Asus MW203 Wireless Silent Mouse Review: An All Rounder, of Sorts

Easy to recommend to streamers and office users.

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The Asus MW203 is a wireless mouse with near silent buttons and an ergonomic form factor aimed at users hooked to their PCs for long hours. Priced at Rs 1,999 It’s fairly affordable for a professional mouse and comes with the bells and whistles including a DPI switch, additional side buttons and the ability to control multiple devices without switching the dongle. It certainly packs a lot of features for the price, but how does it perform? Let’s find out —

Asus MW203 Wireless Silent Mouse

Rs 1,999
8.6

Design and Build

9.0/10

Comfort

9.0/10

Connectivity

8.5/10

Performance

8.0/10

Battery Life

9.0/10

Value For Money

8.0/10

What Is Good?

  • Silent buttons
  • Useful side buttons
  • On the fly DPI switching
  • Mutli-device connect

What Is Bad?

  • Not for left handed use
  • Multi-device connect requires manual switching
  • Not ideal for gaming

Design

The Asus MW203 sports an asymmetric ergonomic form factor meant strictly for right handed users. Left handed mouse users (although a rare breed) reading this review can stop right here. For the vast majority, the MW203 intuitively takes the shape of your palm with a rubberised panel to rest your thumb, making it ideal for long hours of usage.

Apart from the right and left clicks, and the scroll wheel, there are three more buttons and an LED indicator. Two on the left edge for going backward and forward, and one on top to change the polling rate on the fly. There are two more buttons at the bottom to connect and switch the mode of connection, and a nifty space to stash the wireless dongle alongside the single AAA battery that powers the mouse.

But the biggest draw is the silent click. There’s now a growing demand for silent mice, particularly among streamers who can’t tolerate the clicks leaking from their mics. And the Asus MW203 is perfect for the scenario. The clicks are barely audible, to the point that it doesn’t feel like you’re using a mouse, as even the sound of the click is named after the same. It’s going to feel a little odd when you’re starting to use the mouse, but it would be really hard to go back to listening to that sound.

Weighing 96 grams, it also feels heavy. On a mouse mat, the MW203 needs a good amount of wrist work to move around. It glides, but doesn’t fly. This makes it perfect for editing videos where the weight adds the required stability for small, accurate movements, but bad for gaming, especially FPS shooters where you can’t let the heft impede your reaction times.

Connectivity

While there’s no connecting the MW203 with a wire, you get three options to connect wirelessly — RF 2.4GHz, Bluetooth 3.0 and Bluetooth 5.0. After the initial setup, connecting the mouse is as easy as plugging in the USB dongle and pressing the connect button on the mouse.

The multi-connect system can be exploited to connect to at max three devices at a time, and switch around with just a button. That makes it all the more useful for people moving between multiple machines on the desk, including Android phones. It’s not the most intuitive way to switch between devices though. There are mice that can simply jump from one device to another by moving to the edge of the screen (something that the upcoming macOS Monterey update is slated to bring). The MW203 does none of that. And that’s also as far as the multi-connect goes. More expensive mice like the Logitech MX Master 3 can even copy and paste files between two devices.

Performance

Now I mentioned earlier that the MW203 isn’t ideal for gaming. Well, it’s not ideal but it did help me get a few impressive frags in CS:GO. It’s no match for a wired mouse, but it doesn’t outright impede your play.

The real benefit of using the MW203 is when you’re working long hours, researching a project, editing a video or goofing around the internet. And that’s a much wider use case to notice how thoughtfully this mouse is created. We tend to think of the mice as an afterthought. Some would even stick to using those horrible trackpads on their office laptops, and I’m speaking especially to those users here — The MW203 will be life changing, for two reasons particularly —

  1. The side buttons that’s programmed to go back or front on web browsers, Windows Explorer and even in some games, will save eons in computer-operating-time that would otherwise have been wasted in having to drag the cursor to the back icon, and clicking it. It’s non-programmable though, unlike the more expensive multi-button mice out there, but for what it’s worth, it takes up the most useful function I think you can get.
  2. Second is the DPI switch on the top. Pressing the button cycles between 1000, 1600 and 2400 DPI which in layman’s term determines how sensitive the mouse will be to hand movement. Slow the DPI down to 1000 and you’ll have to move the mouse a good distance to reach from one end to the other, but at 2400, a tiny flick is enough to take the mouse to the edge. I could slow down the mouse when editing a copy, or speed it up when I’m feeling too lazy to lug the mouse around the mat while surfing.

Should you buy?

The MW203 isn’t like the average mouse. It may seem expensive, but it will be hard to go back to an ambidextrous mouse after using it. It borrows a lot of features from more expensive offerings, but remains simple enough to work without any tinkering. It’s not the only silent mouse in this segment though. The Logitech M331 is cheaper, and is just as silent as this one. But the MW203 surpasses that with the additional buttons, multi-device support and on-the-fly DPI switching, all in a premium, ergonomic design. At Rs 1,999 that’s a steal of a deal.