ProtoArc EM06 Trackball Review
A solid trackball that I see myself daily driving. A couple of improvements I hope to see implemented in future versions but nothing major.
I'm currently using an Elecom Huge trackball and was looking for an ambidextrous trackball to put in the middle of my new split keyboard, Epomaker Split 65, and luckily ProtoArc provided this unit for testing purposes just now.
What I liked:
Amazing cursor movement and trackball feel. Small and slow movements are accurate. Large and fast ones are easy to execute and work as expected. This is the most important part of any trackball. Top tier here.
Solid build quality all around. Button clicks are silent and feel good to click.
Remapping of buttons is saved on the device and does not require any extra software. Especially useful if you're on Linux like me.
Ambidextrous design means this can be used with both hands which is great to alleviate shoulder pain.
Plenty of buttons available. I like to use two buttons to scroll up and down with. Tap once to scroll a bit. Hold to keep on scrolling. This for me is the optimal setup for scrolling as it's super reliable while being easy to use. Unfortunately there's a tiny issue here, which I explore next.
Solid tracking in 2.4GHz mode which I tested for a couple of minutes only as I'm a wired only kind of dude.
The included travel bag is a treat! Never had any other trackball come with one! Really good quality.
What I'd like to see improved:
The "scroll up" and "scroll down" mappings scroll only once even when held. This is a major issue for me. Hopefully it gets resolved in a firmware update.
Macro creation is also a hassle. I went through hoops to map buttons as page up and page down to get around the scrolling issue. Now I can hold the buttons to scroll up and down continuously but unfortunately this is not like a scroll wheel event and under certain conditions, like when you're inside a text area typing text, page up and page down don't work for scrolling.
Palm rest area. I feel like it gets in the way more than it helps. It would have been perfect if that was detachable so we can choose to have it there or not.
Wired only version. Simpler and lighter and cheaper and I prefer to not worry about batteries at all.
Hope this helps.
Cheers.