If you need a mouse and want something simple, it's hard to go wrong with the M240 Silent. With 18 months of battery life from one AA battery, Bluetooth LE connectivity, and almost-silent clicks, you could do far worse - specially considering the price.
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Silence
You won’t often find us straying from our MacBook’s trackpad. It’s silent, reliable and performs without any complaints. There are times, however, when a trackpad just doesn’t cut it. We’re not against using those colourful glowy mice that promise to make you a better aimer, laner, and person. But they’re usually expensive, some of them still have cables attached (yuck), and their RGB lights aren’t going to impress anyone in your meeting. So when Logitech’s new M240 Silent mouse showed up on Stuff’s doorsteps, we thought we might as well give it a try.
It solved a few problems right off the bat. One, it’s wireless. Two, it’s small, light and pink. And three, it’s silent. 90% more so than Logitech’s other, cheaper mice – at least, that’s what the product page says. And something we can attest to in an office filled with louder clicks. That leaves one question: is it worth R400?
Comfortably Thumb
As we’ve said, the M240 Silent is small and light. Really light, clocking in at 73g (with the AA battery included). Having come from Logitech’s more premium office worker, the M650, we were concerned that the lesser weight and modest frame would leave us wanting more. How wrong we were.
Logitech claims the M240 Silent is best suited for users with “small-to-medium-sized hands”. Not to brag, but the hands handling our review model are slightly larger than medium. Take that as you will. Yet, we had no issues getting to grips with the M240, easily maintaining a firm hold on the mouse’s comfortable, if slight, stature.
As for what you’ll be gripping besides the mouse’s plastic body, there’s not much. Logitech’s kept the physical features of this one light to keep the price down. You won’t find any programmable side buttons here, nor any rubber grips alongside it. For a mouse in this price range, we’re not surprised. If you want something with more functionality than the standard three-button setup, you’ll need to whip out the bigger bucks.
Living up to the name
This is the first midrange mouse from the company to sport the Silent Touch branding, usually reserved for its pricier mice. We’re happy to see it loosening that grip and passing out some of the better tech to other models. But does the M240 live up to its name? If you hadn’t already guessed, it does.
We won’t pretend it’s as silent as Logitech’s higher-end offerings, but it does a damn good job of imitating them. Clicking won’t yield an entirely noise-free environment, but the resulting noise is far easier to ignore for both the user and anyone in the vicinity. When you’re spending R400 or less on a well-built mouse, beggars can’t be choosers.
Silence aside, the M240 is quite a capable office runner. It’s got a DPI (Dots per inch) range of 400-4,000. That’ll suit anyone that isn’t looking to go pro in Fortnite. It’s also good enough for a casual session of Minecraft or Portal 2 if that’s your thing. Adjusting the DPI takes a little more effort than we were expecting because it lacks a dedicated button. You’ll need the Logi Options+ app to handle stuff like that, pointer sensitivity, and assigning the scroll wheel button its own function.
It’s a good thing you can because the M240’s scroll wheel is probably its least satisfying feature. That doesn’t mean it’s bad. But what Logitech calls “line-by-line scrolling” we’d call “stiff”, which can occasionally throw off the rather balanced feature set present here. Fortunately, the same can’t be said for the M240’s button-pressing abilities, which manage to be gratifyingly tactile as well as aurally unobtrusive.
Assault and Battery
Unlike Logitech’s other peripherals which usually require some sort of dongle, the M240 is purely reliant on Bluetooth – and the included AA battery if you want to be a smartass. It’s compatible with just about everything, as long as it’s running macOS, Windows, ChromeOS, Linux or Android.
We tested that by pairing it with our smartphone and it worked like a charm with no perceptible input delay. It didn’t end up being that useful, but we could see it being a handy feature for anyone running off a tablet.
It’s using Bluetooth Low Energy to keep that AA battery alive as long as possible which, if Logitech isn’t being overly optimistic, should be around 18 months. We’ve had the M240 for less than that, but so far, so good.
Logitech M240 Silent verdict
When it gets down to it, you can’t go wrong with the Logitech M240 Silent. It’s got (mostly) everything you’d need; a small but comfortable frame, virtually silent clicks, 18 months of battery life and three colours to choose from. Our biggest complaint, the slightly-too-stiff scroll wheel, is easily forgotten when you see the R400 price tag (or less if you’re lucky).