Cherry MW 8 Advanced Wireless Mouse Review

Cherry MW 8 Advanced

A wireless mouse with dual connectivity

In the world of computer peripherals, Cherry is close to a household name. Their line of mechanical key switches has taken over the world but that’s not all the company is known for. They’ve spent years making their own complete peripherals, often focusing on the business and point-of-sale worlds.

Today, we’re looking at their brand new wireless mouse, the Cherry MW 8 Advanced. It looks downright striking but also offers dual wireless connectivity for RF and Bluetooth, and a whopping battery life of up to 70 days.

It looks good on paper but does it justify it’s $60 MSRP? Let’s dig in and find out.

Inside the box we have the mouse itself, the nano USB dongle (which is pre-installed into a magnetic storage slot in the back), a micro-USB charging cable, a nice travel pouch, and some documentation. Given the size of the mouse, it would work very well for traveling, so I’m especially glad to see the pouch to keep things safe and together.

As you can tell, the MW 8 Advanced is a simple mouse with only six buttons. It features a four DPI presets that step up from 600 to 1000, 1600, and 3200. Compared to the 16,000 and now 18,000 DPI ratings featured on gaming mice since last year, this feels downright pedestrian. Don’t let the marketing hype fool you, though: those five digit DPIs are completely unusable in most cases and are pure “big numbers” glam. 3200 is perfectly usable up to 4K resolutions and, personally, I find 1600 to be a good fit for 1080p.

Design

Taking a closer look at the mouse itself, Cherry has really knocked it out of the park with the design. The top shell is made of aluminum. The top is anodized black and finished with a brushed surface. The edges are cut and polished to form a silver outer ring. The mouse wheel, below the rubber grip, is finished the same way, giving the top this beautiful mixture of brushed a polished metal that reflects light beautifully.

The sides have a rubberized finish to them which helps with grip but it’s so firm it’s still fairly slippery. They have a really eye-catching design to them with a polygonal pattern straight out of a science fiction movie. The lines of the pattern are reflective, so stand out in the light.

Overall, I am fairly blown away at the look of this mouse. The designer really needs to be commended for creating something unique, eye-catching, and elegant all at once. This feels like the kind of mouse you would see in the office of a CEO.

On the bottom we find two long teflon feet, our mystery optical sensor, as well as our mode selector switch. These are genuinely useful features all since the mouse glides like a dream. Compared to the G Pro Wireless and the G502 HERO I tested against, both wound up feeling scratchy compared to the MW 8. I also really like that you can switch between the 2.4GHz dongle and Bluetooth connectivity on the fly, easily allowing you to swap devices.

With that out of the way, let’s get into Usage Impressions.

Usage Impressions

Having used the MW 8 Advanced for a good couple of weeks, I can confidently say a couple of things. First, this mouse really feels nice. I don’t mean shape or weight here (that would be the opposite); I mean, the metal top literally feels nice. The fancy design of its upper shell and sides also give it a refined quality that I really like. Second, the rest of the design falls flat, which is ironic because if you drop it, it’s going bottom-first every time.

See, for some reason, Cherry has loaded all the weight into the very back of the mouse, so every time you lift it, the heel drags along your desk. Try to pick it up in a normal grip a little higher and it will turn completely vertical it’s so rear-loaded. It’s unbalanced, which isn’t something I’m used to coming from my usual Logitech mice. This weird weighting also has the side effect of making the MW 8 feel heavier than it actually is, which isn’t good for a mouse this size.

As a palm/hybrid-grip user, I found it entirely too small to comfortably use for very long at a time. The stubby bottom half and complete lack of palm support leaves me feeling like I need to pinch this small mouse to use it, which isn’t very comfortable.

This weird grip also makes the stiffness of left and right buttons stick out like a sore thumb. They have have light-sounding clicks that don’t match the extra pressure you need to apply. It’s not difficult to use, they’re only mouse buttons after all, but it feels more stiff than it needs to. The Forward and Back buttons on the thumb work perfectly.

Let’s talk about that sensor. It works. I don’t know what it is, and can find nothing official about the polling rate, but for casual gaming I found it completely sufficient. For competitive games like Battlefield V, it was the size and shape that held me back, not the tracking, so I gave it up after a good few tests. I did run it through Zowie’s Mouse Rate Checker and wasn’t able to get a reading higher than 240Hz. Compared to a good wired mouse, it does feel slightly laggier, which would align with this rate (gaming mice are often 1000Hz, even on many wireless models today). I wasn’t able to make it spin out, though, so, again, if you have small hands or are already a claw user, your results may vary. Still, this isn’t a gaming mouse.

What really makes me scratch my head, though, is Cherry’s talk of “ingenious features.” The only thing I could really see standing out like this is the ability to switch between Bluetooth and the wireless dongle, but that’s hardly unique or surprising. In fact, apart from the nice aluminum touches, there’s hardly anything unique about this mouse at all. It’s a simple wireless mouse that lets you choose between 2.4GHz and Bluetooth that also happens to look super cool.

When it comes to battery life, Cherry does have a winner there. After a full charge, I haven’t had any low battery indicators in the last several weeks. Without software, I’m not sure how much battery I have remaining, but so far so good on that front.

Conclusion

For $60, or even the $52 it’s currently selling for on Amazon, this mouse feels a bit overpriced. It looks great and I love the metal finish, but it brings almost nothing special to the table in features. Keyboards and mice have been doing wireless and Bluetooth for a long time, so I tally that one under “nice to have” but not exactly impressive in 2019. I would love to talk about the lifespan of the switches or how accurate the sensor is but since Cherry has decided not to publish those details, I really can’t. The sensor feels accurate but there’s no way to know beyond subjective opinion.

Here’s the thing, this mouse feels refined in a way most others don’t. There’s no RGB, no sharp edges, or other gamer-garb. It looks like the kind of mouse you’d use while wearing a business suit in a high rise office backed by a sprawling view of the city below. More than any other mouse I’ve used, the Cherry MW 8 Advanced is a mouse with personality, professional personality. On that token, maybe it really doesn’t matter if you don’t know what the sensor is.