Logitech MX Master 3 review

The MX Master 3 has more customisable buttons than you'll probably know what to do with, but it's this flexibility that makes it worth its premium price. Logitech's Flow and Easy Switch features are also useful in the right workstation. It's a worthy home office investment.

Are you old enough to remember when a computer mouse had a single button on the top and rolled on a rubber ball underneath?

If so, you’ll be amazed at how far the humble mouse has come. The Logitech MX Master 3 is about the most fully-featured productivity mouse you can get your hands on and is an outstanding example of how far this simple device has come.

In contrast to the mice of yore, the MX Master 3 has 7 buttons and 11 customisable commands. It also has two scroll wheels, one for vertical scrolling and a second for horizontal movement. It can be synced to three machines at once and can copy data from one computer and paste it to another.

It’s sombre design is exactly what you expect from a top-shelf mouse with a business focus. The charcoal coloured body looks like a standard mouse that has sat too close to a heater and has started to melt down the left hand side. This creates an ergonomic shelf for your left and conceals a hidden button. I’ve found the MX Master 3 enormously comfortable to use for full days at work.

The MX Master 3 is powered by an internal battery which is charged with a USB-C cable plugged into the front. Logitech estimates you should get 70 days of use between charges, which I haven’t managed to confirm, but it seems to track with my current use so far.

What really sets the MX Master apart from most other computer mice is the sheer level of customisation available. As I mentioned above, there are 11 customisable functions; one for each of the visible buttons, but the hidden button which you can assign a command for when you click or click-swipe in four directions.

For most of these buttons, you can choose a command which will work across all apps you have installed. These commands can be basic things like opening or closing windows, copy and paste, or opening the Task View. You can also assign any keystroke combination to a button, opening up the possibilities even more.

If you want even more granular control, you can also apply application specific shortcuts to these buttons too. For example, you might set a button to ‘Open New Tab’ in your web browser. Or you may set a scroll wheel to zooming duties in Adobe Photoshop.

The Logitech Options software makes the process of setting this all up very easy. In fact, I found the most difficult part was remembering which button performs which function. You certainly have a lot of flexibility here, but it definitely increases the complexity too.

The most surprising part about the modern mouse, including the MX Master 3, is the way the mouse is now a networking device, of sorts. Logitech has two important features in its premium mouse range called Flow and Easy Switch, which make using multiple computers simple.

Easy Switch is, as the name suggests, a way to continue using the MX Master 3 when switching between different machines. The mouse comes with a USB wireless receiver for the first machine and can connect to two different computers using Bluetooth. Once you have them set up, you click a button at the base of the mouse to switch between machines.

If you have at least two machines connected, which are also on the same local network, you can use Flow, a bit of tech wizardry that makes it so that you can move objects between machines as easily as you move them around one. You can drag-and-drop files, copy and paste text, etc. It’s not a feature that you may find you need regularly (if at all) but it is a very cool feature in find in a mouse.

The Logitech MX Master 3 is one of the most featured-packed computer mice you can buy, and is both highly customisable and extremely comfortable to use, but you do pay a premium for these features. With an RRP of $169.95, you can buy three more basic mice for the same price.

That said, the street price for the mouse is much cheaper (we’ve seen it for as low as $129 at the time of writing this) and even if you don’t think you’ll use all of the features, it is still a great mouse to use. And when you have your hand on your mouse for hours each day, you may feel, like we do, that it’s a decent place to invest in your office setup.