Almost entirely satisfactory
I wouldn't call four stars "better than expected". What I expected was my ideal mouse; what I received was a little short of that.
I've been using the Logitech M305 for some years, and it was perfect for me. The smaller size fit very nicely in my little hand, all the moving parts were exactly as responsive as I wanted them to be, the battery life was good, etc. But it finally started to die, as all things must, so time to get a new one.
Since the M305 is out of print, I turned to the M325. I was hoping it would be as close to identical as possible, and it pretty much is! The size and shape are a beautiful fit for my aforementioned little hand (big-handed users may find it too small, idk).
The two main buttons are connected to the fixed palmrest of the mouse, rather than being separate pieces as with the M305, and I was concerned this would make them stiffer (a problem I've had with the similarly-attached M235) but this is not the case.
The laser sight uses invisible light. I do somewhat miss the M305's red, but I admit that the M325 is strictly better here.
The scroll wheel moves a lot more freely than the M305's did, allowing me to scroll a lot very fast when I want to, but isn't too sensitive for me to scroll only a little. Very nice. The centre click is, of course, essential.
I haven't used it enough yet to comment on the battery life, but I can say it's at least fine.
The centre button/scroll wheel also has left/right tilt clicks, which brings me to the first of my problems. By default, these are Back and Forward. I learned this when I was trying to use centre-click to open links in a new tab. An accidental nudge of pressure one way or t'other sending me completely off the page I'm on really isn't okay! I had to download Logitech's special software to fix it, so I did that, changed it to left/right scroll, tweaked the cursor sensitivity while I was there, applied my changes and closed the program. At which point it promptly reverted to defaults. Apparently if I want to make basic functionality changes I have to leave the program running, constantly. Decidedly not ideal.
My other problem is the click. While it feels right, it is much too loud. A loud click when the button goes down, a loud click when it comes back up. It's loud enough that if I weren't the one using it I wouldn't be able to tolerate it. As it is, it's annoying, but I'm hoping I'll get used to it.
The M305 was audible, but much softer. I don't remember how it sounded when it was new, though, so maybe it quieted with age and wear, and maybe the M325 will too. I hope so.
As I write this, the product is $34.00. I paid $23.20, an absolute bargain. $34 is... reasonable, I suppose, for a high-quality mouse, but I'd be reluctant to pay much more.
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