Razer Megasoma is a hybrid of a hard and a soft mouse mat; If you love the softness of a soft mat but want to have the speed of a hard mat, Razer Megasoma delivers (this is debatable and I guess more like a personal preference). Razer Megasoma sits somewhere in between, combining the best of both worlds into one.

In terms of aesthetic look, Razer Megasoma looks great in white. If you have a dark table like mine, Razer Megasoma really shines on it. It actually has a green ambient glow on the top right of the mat. So if you’ve exposed the mat to a light source for quite some time, you’ll see the big green glowing Razer logo coming from it if you turn off the light. It’s just a fancy geeky thing though as this does not add real value to your gaming experience. The light, once glows, doesn’t stay for too long. I wish that the logo sticks to the mat like the one on the screenshot though I think it looks cool but others would probably want a minimalist design on their mouse pads.

Razer Megasoma is a silicon mouse mat which makes it easily foldable. On top of that, Razer has nicely given a hard case for the mat. If you love going to LAN parties or joining game tournaments, Razer Megasoma will be your best companion as it’s highly portable. Simply fold the mat and carry it inside the case. The silicon has a distinct smell to it when you let the mat out of its packaging for the first time. The smell, thankfully, doesn’t stay too long. Razer Megasoma is also washable so you’ll always have a bright white shiny mat all the time.

Plenty of mouse movement space offered by Razer Megasoma so it might not fit your set-up if you have a small table (Razer Megasoma’s dimension is 350 x 230 x 2 mm). With a 2mm thickness of softness, Razer Megasoma offers a great comfortable gaming experience, giving your wrist a nice, soft-y feeling.

Coming from the newer Razer Vespula, I had to admit that I like Razer Vespula better. I’m a low sensitivity gamer so I found it harder to adjust with Razer Megasoma’s softer surface. I was so used to Razer Vespula’s glide smoothness and found that I needed to apply extra force to glide my mouse on the Razer Megasoma.

As for accuracy and whether the mouse mat delivers, it does. I play Left 4 Dead 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 almost every night and I *ahem* own the games on the Megasoma. Pointing the cursor accurately to enemies’ heads is no big deal on Razer Megasoma.

Razer Megasoma Review Conclusion

If you can’t decide whether you want to get a hard mouse mat or a soft one, why not get the good of both worlds? Razer Megasoma tracks mouse movement really well and its soft silicon surface goes well on my wrist when I game for hours. The smell on the silicon and the not-too-obvious glowing logo are a bit of a letdown but they don’t hamper you in any way when you game. The silicon smell wears off quickly and you won’t probably miss seeing the ambient light coming from the mat when you switch off the light.

One of the thing that I like about Razer Megasoma is how highly portable it is. It’s easy to fold the mat and store it on the glass hard case that comes with it. You can even make it into a show case if you are into that sort of thing. Once unfolded, the mat will fall back into place and sticks onto your desk surface really well. If you are the type who always carries around your own mouse pad, take Razer Megasoma with you. Once you get home, feel free to wash it with a soap and water and it’ll be like brand new again!

Despite all this, however, I still find that I need to apply extra force to move my mouse on the Razer Megasoma. Whether this suits your taste or not, it’s subjective.

Note: Review unit provided by Razer

This is great news for Australian gamers as it means that they have more variety of gaming peripherals to choose from. SteelSeries is a leading manufacturer of gaming peripherals and accessories and you must have seen my review on the SteelSeries Ikari Laser and SteelSeries Xai gaming mouse here at Craving Tech. I haven’t had a chance to play around with their other peripherals yet, though.

Below is the official press release. I went to JB HiFi today but couldn’t see any SteelSeries products yet though.. just the Logitech’s and Razer’s. Hope they are in stock soon.

A similar situation to my post a few days earlier about the reverse phone lookup, I’m wondering whether there is any reverse email lookup service for Australians as well.. An email address search, such as offered by EmailTracer.com would be useful especially if you want to validate a person’s real email address who just contacted you for a business proposal. Back in the old days, we did business by meeting face to face or at least speaking to one another. Nowadays, we do it over emails, forums, or through other electronic social media.

Using spoof email addresses is something but people claiming to be someone else is definitely more devastating. Sometimes we got too excited over things and we forgot to validate the URLs, the real email address, or even the business identity itself. A more technical person can check the IP address of the email domain and probably start investigating from there. But for novice users, we just want to know the real identity just of a person just by searching the email address in our inbox.

I also wish that we can search someone’s email address using their real names alone. Sometimes I want to send an email to a long lost friend but didn’t know where he/she is now. The only way nowadays is hoping that he/she somehow has a Facebook account or at least being searchable in Google. A good email search lookup service might be useful although I’ll start blabbering about the privacy and stuff   Which leads me to a question, do you actually want people to find your email address that easily?

PS: Anyway, if you’re still wondering what it means by a reverse email lookup, there’s a good explanation on the site I mentioned earlier or you can also check the wikipedia about it.

NEO Pro is a third party add-on for Microsoft Outlook, made by a software company Caelo (meaning “the heavens” in Latin). It is indeed a heaven for Outlook users, especially those who use it in a commercial environment. Hundreds or probably thousands of Outlook emails are cluttering your inbox every single day. Sending an email through Outlook is a breeze, but organizing them in a specific manner is another story.

NEO Pro smartly organizes your emails and makes them completely searchable, easier and faster than ever.

NEO Pro Review – How NEO Pro works

After you install and open NEO Pro, it will automatically sync with your Outlook installed in the system. It automatically indexes and organizes your emails, folders, and categories for you. If you have both opened, NEO Pro will synchronize nicely with Outlook whenever new emails arrive. Since it sits on top of Outlook, it’s recommended to open Outlook first before you open NEO Pro.

NEO Pro also works together with Outlook. So for example, you can use the NEO Pro advanced search feature (more on this later), find that one email you are looking for, and reply to it through NEO Pro (which will then point to the real email in Outlook and open the Outlook’s reply dialogue box). Nifty.

You don’t even need to open your Outlook anymore once you have NEO Pro running. All your new emails will be displayed in NEO Pro interface as well + a notification window coming on your Windows taskbar. When you want to reply or create a new email, clicking on the corresponding button on NEO Pro will open your Outlook dialogue window automatically.

When you delete an email from either Outlook or NEO Pro, the other one will be kept in sync (the deleted email will go to Outlook deleted items folder).

NEO Pro Review – Features

NEO Pro Organizer

Neo Pro automatically organizes your emails smartly and here are some of the most useful ones in my opinion:

• Correspondent (the email sender)
  Most of the time you’ll probably want to view all emails coming from a specific person.
• Category (from Outlook categories)
  I don’t normally categorize my emails specifically, but you’ll appreciate this if you are using it to manage your emails.
• Date (Year-month)
  Rather than “Yesterday”, “3 days ago”, or “Last week”, NEO Pro completely segment emails into a year & month value.
• Attachment
  There are times when you just want to get a document being attached to you some time ago. This is the best place to find rather than trying to browse through hundreds of emails and trying to look for that “attachment paper clip” icon in your inbox.

NEO Pro Search

The best of all, NEO Pro search is powerful, simple, and simply works!

You can totally customize the search without being overly too complex. You search by keywords on specific folders or the whole account, just like Outlook. However, you can also search under the NEO Pro categories I explained earlier. For example, you can go to the Correspondent Tab and use the “Search in folder” from there. NEO Pro automatically searches your keywords under the selected Correspondent. This makes the search much faster and you’ll get less cluttered search results.

You can also search for any keywords in the Subject, Body, Names/addresses, and attachments names. It will match any combination of the words. So if you remember a few words of your lost email, type them here in any order and NEO Pro will find it for you in an instant!

Searching for attachments can be done by going to the “Attachment” tab and type the keywords to search. You can search all attachment types or specific ones (for example, a Microsoft Word or a PDF document)

NEO Pro search is actually much much faster compared to the Outlook search. Since emails get categorized automatically by NEO Pro, it helps a lot to trim down the search into getting the results that you really want. Unless you’ve been putting bunch of rules, filters, and folders in your Outlook, NEO Pro will save your time BIGGGGGG TIME. You never have to worry about maintaining and organizing your Outlook any more!

The only problem that I got is that new emails couldn’t be found when I tried to search for the keywords. After some digging into the interface, I found this setting:

Changing this setting to 1 minute (depends on how frequent you receive new emails, I guess) cured the problem. Or you can also click on the “Update the Word Index” manually if you like.

NEO Pro Review Conclusion

NEO Pro is not meant to replace your Outlook but to complement it, greatly. You’ll truly appreciate this application if you receive lots of emails every day and you haven’t been doing your job well in managing rules, filters, and folders. I honestly have been lazy adding my filter rules because new opportunities and business partners flock my inbox every week. I’m just too lazy in keeping up with this altogether. NEO Pro does all of these for you. It categorizes your emails automatically which means that you can worry about replying business opportunities or support rather than wasting your time managing your own inbox.

Searching in NEO Pro is a breeze, thanks to the great auto management of emails. Not to mention that the search is powerful and very quick, compared to Outlook. I managed to get the email that I wanted to search quicker in NEO Pro. In Outlook, sometimes my search results gave me 10 out of 1 email that I’m really interested in.

So if you’ve given up trying to manage the constant flux of emails coming to your inbox, look no further than trying NEO Pro @Caelo! NEO Pro is compatible with Outlook 2007, 2003, 2002 (XP), 2000, 98 and operates on Windows 7, Vista, XP, 2000, NT, ME or Windows 98 – with or without Exchange Server (all versions).

Note: Review license provided by Caelo

If you are a Mac owner, you might be interested in grabbing this free e-magazine Mac tips and tricks. A complimentary e-magazine from MakeUseOf, the Mac manual supplies you with numerous tips, tricks and free applications. Get the hang of the interface and discover what your Mac is really capable of.

Gone are the days when Macs were only considered valid ‘office’ computers. These days, Macs are the slick icons of the design and music industries — and now they’re also spreading to the general consumer market. But even though Macs are an overall reincarnation of simplicity and user-friendliness, most people – whether they are computer initiates or have been working with Windows their entire life – need a little help getting started.

This slick, sixty-odd paged monster is based on Snow Leopard – the latest release of the Mac OS X operating system – and tells you everything you need to know about Mac. With this free guide you will also receive daily updates on new cool websites and programs in your email for free courtesy of MakeUseOf.

Quick while the offer lasts! You can check it out on the free e-magazines section.