Logitech MX Anywhere 3S Review: Compact, Comfortable, and Responsive
Logitech is known for making fantastic products, including my MX Mechanical Mini keyboard that I love so much. When I tried out Logitech’s new MX Anywhere 3S mouse, I was blown away by how instantly I fell in love with it.
I have small hands, and this compact mouse felt normal-sized to me. On top of that, the mouse just feels good to use. It’s highly responsive, the scroll wheel feels buttery smooth, and there are a ton of ways to customize the mouse’s buttons.
The MX Anywhere 3S retails for $79.99 and will start shipping out units in June 2023. If you’re not convinced yet that the MX Anywhere 3S should be your next mouse, read on.
Here’s What We Like
- Incredibly compact and comfortable, especially for small hands
- Super quiet clicks and scrolling
- Flawlessly moves across any surface
- Lots of ways to personalize the mouse
And What We Don’t
- A bit awkward for larger hands
- Only four possible customizable buttons
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Design: Portable, Comfortable, and Compact
Performance & Customization: Plenty of Options
Battery Life & Connectivity: Ridiculously Plentiful
Verdict: The MX Anywhere 3S Is a Slam Dunk
Design: Portable, Comfortable, and Compact
The MX Anywhere 3S is a compact, comfortable mouse that’s perfect for small to medium hands. I’ve always felt like traditional computer mice are too large for my abnormally small hands, and this mouse fits perfectly for me. At 95 grams or 0.2 pounds, it’s also a pretty lightweight mouse.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that someone with large hands wouldn’t find the MX Anywhere 3S comfortable enough to use in a pinch. My husband has pretty large hands, and he said that it felt awkward enough that he wouldn’t want to use it as his daily driver, but there are some awesome features, like the scroll wheel, that make it fun to use.
Button clicks are blissfully quiet on the MX Anywhere 3S, no matter which button you’re pressing. The buttons on the left side are easy to reach with my thumb, and the smooth material below the buttons is soft and cool to the touch. Logitech says the mouse has an ambidextrous design, and while it is symmetrical, a left-handed user would need to push the side buttons with their ring finger, which feels a bit awkward.
It’s also made more sustainably than its predecessor, the MX Anywhere 3. The plastic parts of the mouse include certified post-consumer recycled plastic. The graphite color uses 78% recycled plastic, while the pale gray and rose colors use 61%.
Performance & Customization: Plenty of Options
Logitech’s newest addition to the MX Anywhere line introduces 8K DPI tracking on virtually any surface, including four-millimeter-thick glass. I’ve been using the mouse on a variety of surfaces—wood, cloth, glass, MDF—without a mouse pad, and it worked flawlessly.
If you’re unfamiliar with what DPI is, it stands for ‘dots per inch,’ and it’s a measurement of how sensitive a mouse is. A higher DPI makes it easier to move your cursor across the screen with a small movement of the mouse. The average mouse nowadays has a DPI of about 1,600.
Within the Logi Options+ software, you can max out the DPI at 8K if you want your MX Anywhere 3S to be highly responsive, or knock it down to a DPI you’re comfortable with. By default, your pointer speed is set to 50%, or about 4,000 DPI.
The mouse also features a super smooth MagSpeed Electromagnetic scrolling wheel. By default, the wheel zips through 1,000 lines per second with the ability to stop on a pixel, and it auto-shifts between ratchet and free-spin mode. The middle button below the scroll wheel is set up to toggle between auto-shifting and always being on free-spin mode.
I absolutely love this auto-shift feature. It’s great to have the rigid feedback when you’re slowly scrolling through a web page, and then swap instantly to free-spin when you know you need to get to the bottom of a page. In Logi Options+, you can customize how rigid you want ratchet mode to be.
Then, you can’t customize what the scroll wheel itself does, but you can customize what the scroll wheel click does within specific applications, as well as the button below it. There’s also a built-in horizontal scrolling feature that’s activated when you hold one of the side buttons and use the scroll wheel.
The best part about any Logitech device is the customizable software that comes with it. With Logitech’s MX Anywhere 3S mouse, you can use Logi Options+ software to personalize the feel of your mouse and customize all of the buttons to your heart’s content.
You can change button functions within specific apps, like Google Chrome or Zoom, though the default options are pretty useful already. Right out of the box, when you use the mouse in Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge, the back button will send you back in your browser history and the front button will send you forward. Zoom and Microsoft Teams are set so the front button starts and stops video and the back button mutes and unmutes the microphone.
There are countless actions you could assign to these two buttons, as well as the middle button and the scroll wheel button, within specific applications. Or, you can also set up custom button actions for when you’re not in any application.
For example, if you know you need to open up a specific website for school every time you open your laptop, you could assign an action to your front button that opens up that specific page in Chrome for you. Or, you could take things a step further with Smart Actions, and use the front button to initiate a multi-step routine that opens multiple apps or tabs at once.
Battery Life & Connectivity: Ridiculously Plentiful
Logitech says that, depending on how you use the mouse, the MX Anywhere 3S can last up to 70 days on a full charge. I haven’t used this mouse for nearly long enough to test the battery claim of 70 days, but I have tested it enough to know that the battery life is incredibly impressive.
In the week or so that I’ve been using the mouse, it’s barely dipped in battery life percentage. If you ever let the battery life get dangerously low, Logitech says that a one-minute charge via the included USB-C charging cable will give you three hours of use.
You can connect up to three devices at a time and hold that wireless connection up to 10 meters away from a device. To swap devices, all you have to do is press the Easy-Switch button on the bottom of the mouse. Any system that supports Bluetooth Low Energy technology can connect to the MX Anywhere 3S, which includes the following:
- Windows 10, 11, or later
- macOS 10.15 or later
- Linux
- Chrome OS
- iPadOS 13.4 or later
- Android 9.0 or later
Verdict: The MX Anywhere 3S Is a Slam Dunk
Logitech’s MX Anywhere 3S makes my life easier; anything that does that is a win in my book. I can maneuver the mouse on any surface, use the seamless auto-shift scroll wheel, and start my workday with a Smart Action that requires a simple button click instead of manually opening five different applications. It’s comfortably compact and might be my new go-to mouse for the foreseeable future.
Here’s What We Like
- Incredibly compact and comfortable, especially for small hands
- Super quiet clicks and scrolling
- Flawlessly moves across any surface
- Lots of ways to personalize the mouse
And What We Don’t
- A bit awkward for larger hands
- Only four possible customizable buttons
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