I haven’t thought about charging my wireless Logitech gaming mouse in two and a half years, because I have a magic mousepad that does it automatically. But Logitech mice that work with the Powerplay mousepad are either expensive, heavy, or both, and none of them double as Bluetooth mice so I can pair them wirelessly with my laptop, handheld, or phone.
Today, Logitech is changing that with the Logitech G309, an $80 mouse that can do almost everything. It’s the first Powerplay mouse this cheap, the first with Bluetooth, the first that lets you use a AA battery when you’re on the go — and the first wireless Logitech mouse to have a supercapacitor inside, so you don’t necessary you don’t need a battery at all.
Even without Powerplay, the G309 is a dual-mode wireless gaming mouse that promises up to 300 hours of battery life with the Lightspeed wireless dongle, or up to 600 hours over Bluetooth, while lugging around its 86g frame.
But if you have that $120 Powerplay mat, you can remove the AA battery to get a total mouse weight of only 68 gramsnearly as light as the 60-gram, $160 Logitech G Pro X Superlight 2 that gave me serious mouse envy last year. That’s possible because the supercapacitor acts as a tiny battery that’s constantly being charged wirelessly by the Powerplay mouse pad underneath. “It never runs out of juice; the battery lasts forever,” promises Nicolas Métral, senior global product manager at Logitech.
It’s not the first wireless gaming mouse to test the waters with a supercapacitor, but when Mad Catz and Razer tried it in 2018, those expensive wireless power mice didn’t have other way to charge them. You had to use them on their included pad or with a wired cord. Until now, Logitech has used internal rechargeable lithium cells to make your Powerplay mice somewhat portable; here, an AA battery is the solution.
While the G309 is one of Logitech’s least expensive gaming mice, it features the same Hero 25K sensor and hybrid optomechanical switches that the company has been offering in its premium mice for some time, both of which are arguably welcome improvements over the $60 G305 mouse on which this mouse is based.
But it’s still missing the one Logitech mouse feature I’d be hard-pressed to live without: the company’s dual-mode ratcheting/free-spinning scroll wheel, which I find myself using constantly to scroll through documents and web pages when using my gaming mouse for work. Of all the gaming mice, that’s still exclusive to the G502 and G903, as far as I can tell.
And it’s a bit of a shame that Logitech is still selling its Powerplay mouse pad for $120 with only the rarest and smallest discounts. If the company really wants to deliver on the G309’s promise of “Wireless Play for All” — that’s Logitech’s tagline — I’d suggest making the whole package more affordable.
Logitech says it will continue to sell the G305 alongside the G309. The G309 can also share a single Lightspeed wireless dongle with a number of Logitech’s wireless keyboards, including the new G515 TKL, G715, G915, G915 TKL, Pro X 60 and Pro X TKL.