Ok, as promised, here's my full Naga review. I have not had time to get any good photos of the device - but - it looks like every other photo of the Naga you've seen. It's not like Razer's hiding anything. I'll get some - mainly to show how it fits my hand - when I can, and add them to this post.

Since this is the first hardware review I'm posting here, I'd like to mention I don't have any "star" or "rating" system for reviews. Honestly, peripherals are too complex to boil down to any simple 1-5 star or whatever rating system. To me. You'll just have to, actually, read, to get my take on it.

Let's start out with the basics: the Naga as "just a mouse." It's great. Fits my hand great, glides on the Razer ExactMat great (Teflon feet for the win!). Typical Razer quality here. As "just a mouse" it's great! I know a lot of people might be concerned it might not be as good when using it for just normal stuff. Don't worry. It's an awesome normal mouse.

But you don't pay $80 for "just a mouse" - so now to the main selling point of the Naga - that 12 button grid on the side for your thumb. The so-called "MMO features." You're wondering if it's physically possible to hit 12 discrete buttons with your thumb. Or if you'll be able to land on the one you want. Yeah, I was worried about that too. And I have a small thumb and do not have overly good fine motor control with it. But, as I'd said before, I wanted to support Razer's realization that "MMOs = MONEY!", so I bought the device.

It's no problem! They do include a few stick-on "dots" (think of the homerow marks on a keyboard) that you can put on the buttons (they suggest a few possible configurations) if you need them, but they're careful to say that "most" people will not need them, and they strongly advise trying the device without them first. I did, and I didn't need them. At all.

Using the Naga, I was very (VERY!) surprised at how quickly I adapted to it. Razer says "most people" will adapt within 18 hours of gameplay. I was somewhat awkward for the first, I don't know, maybe 15 or 20 minutes. By half an hour, it was feeling natural, and by 2-3 hours you'd have to kill me to take my Naga from me. I like it that much.

Currently I'm playing Age of Conan and of course EQ2 and it works great with both - and it'll work with anything as it's just mimicking a keyboard. They do have UI Add-Ons for World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online, since those games of course have a LUA programmable UI. But you don't "need" them as the device is just sending keystrokes 1 through 0 and - and = (the standard main hotbar in 99% of MMOs).

And therein lies my only beef about the Naga: that's all it does (currently). There's a switch on the bottom that flips it to send the keycodes for the number pad versions of those keys, or you can leave it on the default of sending the top row number and -/= keys. If you flipped to "numpad" mode, you could then leave your default hotbar on the top row keys and have the Naga send the keypad keys, which you could bind to another hotbar. But if you want it to send, say, Q E R T F G Z X C V B or some alt-keys, or anything else you're out of luck. And if you want to rebind the forward/back mouse buttons - too bad. They're not reprogrammable - which is ODD for a high end gaming mouse. I've not seen one yet that doesn't have that capability. That'd give you 14 buttons. I'd experiment with binding them to alt and ctrl, so I'd then have 1 through = and alt/ctrl versions of same, all on the mouse. I'm sure that's a driver thing though, and maybe Razer will release a new one that lets you reprogram more things.

Despite that limitation, though, this was well worth the $80 I paid for it, and then some. My beloved Saitek Cyborg has slit its wrists in pure Emo woe as it's been relegated to a shelf, now unused. Naga is new king! :)