Turtle Beach has taken an unusual move to differentiate its new gaming mouse design: It's added a touch screen. As part of the new Command Series of Turtle Beach gaming peripherals, this MC7 wireless gaming mouse features a 2.25-inch touchpad that displays system readouts and in-game control options. Considering the lack of feedback, it's hard to imagine accurately using it without looking—like recent car dashboard controls—but it's certainly a novel way to stand out from the pack, especially since it isn't sold with some kind of AI integration.
As TechSpot reports , Turtle Beach placed the touchpad along the left-hand side of the mouse, close to where your thumb will be. Certainly, rocking your thumb forward to press a button isn't unheard of on gaming mice, but touch controls are notoriously tricky to use if you aren't looking at them.
Alongside the touch interface, the MC7 mouse sports a high-end gaming sensor with a 30,000DPI sensitivity, support for 2.4GHz and Bluetooth wireless connectivity, two hot-swappable 1,000mAh batteries, and 8K polling rate support for the lowest possible input lag when gaming. It also has mechanical switches for the main buttons, and its ergonomics are designed for claw, finger, and palm grip gamers.
That's just about everything Turtle Beach could equip this mouse with, so it's perhaps no surprise it's thrown the touch screen sink at the wall to see if that sticks, too. The $160 price tag is high, but not egregious. Other wireless gaming mice have been priced similarly before, and they didn't come with a touchscreen. The utility of that interface, though, will be the hard sell.
The kind of gamers who spend this much on this kind of mouse demand stability and accuracy above all. They don't want a slip of the thumb to do something untoward mid-game and cause them to lose. While the readouts on the display could have some utility outside of the game, I'm struggling to imagine a scenario where I would meaningfully use such an interface while gaming.
Perhaps I'm just not the right audience. Alongside Turtle Beach, we'll have to find out whether such an audience exists when this mouse launches on July 19.
