I thought this was a great product, might need a few tuning up, but its a great mouse! and it looks really great too!! I would recommend it to people!!!
During my first attempt at installing the software (regular drivers plus something called Immersion Desktop), the mouse worked, but no 'feel'. A call to tech support went great (friendly, knowledgable, didn't try to rush me off the phone) but still no feel.
I kept the mouse. Months later, a hard drive crash required me to start all over again and... it worked! Suddenly, as I moved the mouse over anything that was clickable (Window edges, Buttons, Hyperlinks, Menu Bars, Task Bar Items, Icons, etc.) there was a slight buzzing sound and feel to the mouse. Sort of a vibration, but not what I expected. I fiddled with the Immersion settings and found a set that seemed to work for me (less sound, less buzz).
So know I have a mouse that sort of reacts to clickable things... Does it help? No, not really. Is is distracting? Sometimes. Does it really freak others out when they use it? Definitely. Would I buy it again? No, but I would pick out the non-feeling optical version of this product line again.
So the product gets 3 stars. As a general purpose mouse, I love it. As an iFeel mouse, I don't think it does anything for me. I give the overall product 4 stars, though, because good, helpful, friendly tech support means a great deal to me.
The "Immersion Desktop" stuff is very cool and works great. The tool comes with a number of pre-configured tactile "themes" that you can use or edit as you see fit. Each "theme" (examples: metallic, rubbery, spongy, crisp) carries definitions for how the mouse should feel when dragging windows, resizing windows, rolling over a hyperlink, rolling over a checkbox, etc. I have chosen "metallic" as my favorite.
Some of the sensations are really neat. There is one that feels like squeegeeing a window - quick remarkable that the mouse can do that.
I'm giving the product 4 stars instead of 5 for several reasons. First, the optical mouse didn't like my mousepad, so I am using a pad of paper instead for the moment. Second, the software controlling cursor movement seems to get "confused" momentarily sometimes and the cursor will flutter for a moment - moving the mouse always fixes this. Finally, setup and install was a major pain for me under Windows 2000. By all indications it should have been a simple install and go, but I ended up spending an hour plugging and unplugging the mouse under the desk, installing, reinstalling, rebooting, etc. I finally went to their website and had to download a new driver which worked flawlessly.
My only reservation is that this mouse is USB only with no PS2 adapter. So I am now going to have to buy some kind of USB hub as I have run out of USB ports. I would have liked a PS2 option because I consider using a USB port for things like mice and keyboards to be a bit of a waste, especially since I now have a PS2 port sitting empty.