Jelfin Mouse Review

The Jelfin Mouse is funky looking and even funkier feeling. The ball-shaped mouse comes with a removable, gel-filled cover, and it’s unlike any mouse I’ve ever used before. Unfortunately, the look is the best thing about it, and it’s extremely uncomfortable to use for even moderate periods of time.

The Good: Neat looking, various colors

The Bad: Uncomfortable, wired

The Jelfin Mouse is about the size of a tennis ball, and it looks like a cute little droid (not of the cellphone variety) sitting on your desk. It’s not wireless, but it is plug and play, so you just plug the USB end into a spare port on your computer.

The mouse is silver, and the base, scroll wheel and USB plug come in a range of colors -- blue, pink, green, red and yellow. The squishy cover (which the company says is a “thermoplastic elastomer soft-touch gel cover”) can be peeled off -- for cleaning or replacement, I suppose. It comes off quite easily, but slipping it back on so it lines up with the left- and right-click buttons is a pain.

While the Jelfin Mouse looks cute enough, using it is another story. If you want to get an idea what’s it like, try mousing on your desk with a tennis ball. See how your fingers and hand are wrenched up at an uncomfortably high angle? Now try doing it for more than a few minutes -- if you’re like me, you won’t want to.

I tend to keep my hand resting lightly on a mouse even when I’m not actively clicking and scrolling. With the Jelfin mouse, keeping my hand at such an uncomfortable angle meant that I always took it off the mouse when I wasn’t using it. It just wasn’t pleasant to operate, and I felt my wrist stiffening up after I tried to use it for an extended period of time.

It’s too small -- and I have pretty small hands. I typically have no problem using notebook-sized travel mice as everyday mice. But I always felt like my fingers were either too long for clicking, or that the palm of my hand wasn’t correctly gripping the device.

The Jelfin Mouse is a cute-looking little device, and it might appeal to your child or tween. But for $35, you can certainly find other decorative mice that won’t cause discomfort during use.

Update

After I had finished writing this story, but before I posted it to this site, I spoke with someone from the company who said they were concerned many people were using the mouse incorrectly. According to the spokesman, gripping the mouse like a claw, with the fingers reaching downward, is not the proper way to use it (and this is exactly how I was using it). He said the fingers should rest evenly with the scroll wheel.

I tried this for a while, and it did eliminate some of the problems I had experienced. Unfortunately, it still was not a very comfortable mouse to use. Even using the Jelfin Mouse in the “correct” manner left my forearm tired because I had to keep it raised in order for my fingers to stay level. This meant I wasn’t leaving my hand resting on the mouse when I wasn’t actively using it, and I had to keep reorienting the mouse in my hand every time I needed to click something.

The spokesman said Jelfin would be making a greater push to educate users about the correct way to operate the mouse, which will definitely be a positive thing. Unfortunately, I suspect most people will neglect to read the directions (the whole point of plug and play, after all, is that you can use it right out of the box).

Disclosure: Review samples were provided by the manufacturer. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.