It’s Creative’s big return to the mouse market.  And they spared no expense: the Fatal1ty 1010 owes its name to Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel, a professional gamer under contract with Creative.  For those who aren’t familiar, amongst other victories he won the PainKiller finals in the World CPL Tour taking home $150,000 in a single shot.

So in short, if we believe Creative’s marketing, this is the same Jonathan that helped with this mouse’s conception and even added a number of unique and innovative functions including a personalized weighting system and resolution settings that range from 400, 800 or 1600 cpi in a click of a mouse for a record response time. Without being mean, he seems to have reinvented the wheel because this system has already existed for some time with Logitech and Razer.  We even find it on the last Microsoft Habu.  Moreover, the Creative version isn’t the most practical because we go from 800 to 1600 cpi without any intermediate step.  This is unfortunate because a 1000 or 1200 setting could have been useful for ‘’medium sized" 20, 21, 22 inch LCDs.  On the other hand, we appreciated the different resolutions indicated by color code on the small button behind the scroll wheel.

Creative also integrated two other innovations:

- a system of modular weights. Like on the Logitech G5, we immediately opted for the lighter ones.
- a third fire button on the top of the mouse for the ring finger.  This could be practical in games if it’s well configured but it could also turn into a nightmare.  We confused it with the right click for the middle finger.  And here each time, it was frustrating.

After the average characteristics details, here were the others

The things we really didn’t like... Creative speaks of fire buttons that offer little resistance to ensure rapid firing.  On the contrary, we found them too hard especially compared to those of the Razer, which are particularly comfortable and supple.  Next, Creative insists on its gold plated connection and zero oxygen copper cabling for unbeatable performances.  Besides this fact, the Fatal1ty 1010 is still a 125 Hz mouse transmitting its position only every 8 ms, versus 2 ms for the Logitech gamer mouse (G3 and G5) and 1 ms for the Razer Copperhead.   With four to eight times the latency of the competition, we’ve seen better from a gamer’s mouse.  Of course, we are into the minute details by now and not everyone will notice the differences.  However, this is an area where all delay should be to an ultra-minimum.  In the end, we find that efforts were focused in the wrong areas.

In the same way, the LED sensor seems to be consistent with these incomprehensible choices.  These are components that are reputed to be less trustworthy than laser ones because they have difficulties on less than ideal surfaces.  We can confirm this and if you want this mouse to correctly follow your movements, use a good mouse pad.   On shiny surfaces, transparencies or an irregular wood surface (our desk) there were problems.

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