I recently bought myself a so called professional mousing surface from Everglide. It's the cloth/fabric-based Titan GamingMat, and it incorporates Everglide's award-winning Fibertek Surface, which based on what I've read from the website, is actually a uniquely woven fabric surface that will ensure that the optical mice will track flawlessly with even and constant acceleration throughout it's surface. It will also provide an almost frictionless (a miniscule amount of friction is imperative) surface for the mouse feet to glide on. All of this in turn will provide the user with an improved mousing accuracy and tracking experience. Phew... that's pretty impressive, and you can read all of them here.There are many many different kinds of mousing surfaces in the market at the moment, and could be made from many different kinds of materials ie. glass, aluminium, synthetic rubber, metal, plastic etc. It all boils down to the user's preference and budget. Mousing surfaces have evolved long enough that they are not limited to just those free mouse coasters (usually with very loud cartoon graphics) that you get every now and then or even your bare desk surface. Mice are now used NOT just to plagarize texts off from the internet or to click on the start button of your favourite OS but they are now used as a very accurate pointing/shooting/select tool in today's high-paced computer games. In due time, gamers have come to realize that apart from the mouse itself, the mousing surface (usually the good ones) does make a difference, such as that extra railgun frag in Quake III Arena, or that headshot in de_dust, or even that critical hydralisk drop in the opposing Protoss base that you have been patiently planning for the past 30 minutes.
There is actually money to be made in this, more so with the emergence of professional computer gaming. So, to meet these 'professional gaming' needs, many companies have come up with a myriad of mousing surfaces, all in the name of providing the ultimate mousing surface for the ultimate victory in whichever game that the gamer might be playing. I think I've mentioned product endorsements before in my previous posts about Professional Gaming. Many professional gamers have been approached to endorse a specific brand of mice and/or mousing surfaces so that they would use them during their tourneys and can later claim that brand X's mousing surfaces made him/her somewhat more accurate during his/her last railgun frag :P. Knowing that computer gaming has a large fanbase, there is a lot of advertisement/sale potential to be had thru product endorsements for these mousing surfaces. In a nutshell, the adverts are saying that if you were to use the endorsed products, you could almost be as good as pro-Gamer Y or pro-Gamer Z. Everglide is not an exception, it too has its own gamer endorsed products in the forms of the Fnatic and DKT MonsterMat.
Personally, I'm not a professional gamer, but rather an occassional gamer instead. I've gone thru many different kinds of mousepads, none which are of the professional type :P. And sad to say that, most of them have not provided a very satisfactory mousing experience, and I've always been on the lookout for a good mousing surface at a reasonable price. Also, I came to realize that most typical mousepads are just too small for a decent mousing experience. I think that is why many people choose to use just their desks as their mousing surface, but desk surface being pretty rough can actually wear your mousefeets down pretty quick and that will deteriorate your mousing experience further.
The main reason I bought the GamingMat was it's sheer size; at 355mmX254mmX4mm it easily dwarfs the typical mousepads and is only surpassed by its bigger brother the MonsterMat (444mmX355mmX4.3mm). Many would agree that a large mousing area is really useful in today's high resolution desktops, having an insufficient mousing area would cause your mouse to fall off the mousing surface every now and then, and what's the fun in that :). And it would truly be a disaster if that were to happen when you are actually in the middle of sniping somebody. I'm not trying to give a review here, but having used the GamingMat for a week or so, it seems to be THE mousing surface that I've been looking for, tracks smoothly, has enough friction so that I can actually feel the mouse, and most importantly large enough that my mouse would not fall over the edges :P.
Lots of mousing surface
Logitech MX300 on the Everglide Titan GamingMat
Now, I can only hope that I would at least last me a few years, with moderate usage, after all I paid RM50 for it, and I do hope to get some mileage out of it. pENguiN~ however, thinks that I've just wasted RM50 on a piece of rubber and cloth :P. If you are interested, you can get it too from ModernoPC.com, that's where I got mine from. You can either go to their shop at the address listed in the website, or you can opt for a courier delivery right to your doorstep. Their service is very prompt; upon funds transfer, I got my goods delievered to me on the following day thru courier.
The box in which the mousepad came in.
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