SteelSeries (non)SteelPad QcK

Product: SteelSeries SteelPad QcK Mousepad
Provided By: SteelSeries
Price: $15.95CDN - MemoryExpress

Introduction:

In this day and age, many people spend over eight hours a day at a computer.  Much of this time is spent gripping a mouse and moving it around a desk.  Although some people prefer to grind off their mouse feet and ruin the finish of their desk, most people use a mousepad of some sort.  A trip to your local electronics or specialty computer store reveals dozens of mousepad choices and if you look online, you'll find hundreds - if not thousands of different pads for sale.  SteelSeries has been in the game for a few years and became famous with an actual steel mousepad.  Not everyone wants to have a big chunk of iron on their desk however so they came up with other designs to appeal to a wider audience.

About SteelSeries:

SteelSeries is all about gaming. Our mission is to create performance enhancing gaming gear, created for and by leading professional gamers. We continuously strive to better ourselves, and work with leading professional gamers from 3 different continents to create our products.

Our staff is distributed throughout the world, working from offices in Europe, North America and Asia.

The SteelSeries headquarters are located in Europe (Copenhagen, Denmark), and host the primary office facilities for the company. The headquarters handle all planning, production and partner coordination.

For logistical reasons we also have sales offices in Asia (Taipei, Taiwan) and USA (Los Angeles, California). From Taipei we can reach the entire Asian market, as well as New Zealand and Australia. From Los Angeles we can reach North America, Canada and South America. All manufacturing is done by sub-suppliers from Europe and Asia, and then delivered to one of our warehouses for final processing.

First Impressions:

The SteelPad QcK came in a large box that was packed with air-packs to protect it from the UPS man.  The box arrived relatively undamaged and the pad inside was in perfect working order.  In all honesty, if a cloth mousepad was damaged during shipping - someone would need to be fired at the shipping agency.  The pad comes rolled up in a nice box which makes it stack on store shelves nicely, but is larger to ship than if it were flat and shipped out in a big envelope.

Rolled Up

While this pad isn't as large as some pads on the market, it has a very respectable size and comes in at 320mm x 285mm.  It has more area than an Everglide Giganta, fUnc Archetype 1030, or Ratpadz.  While it is smaller than the NOIDpad, the bonus is that you don't need as much desk area available to place the pad.  Some gamers and graphic designers prefer larger pads but I believe that this pad is about the right size for many desks.

As I mentioned above, the SteelPad QcK comes in a cardboard box that also contains a little brochure about other SteelSeries products.  There is no anti-friction tape or mouse-wax in the box.  SteelSeries believes this pad is good enough on its own.

In The Box

The mousepad is jet black and has a screen printed logo on the bottom left of the surface.  I would image that the logo will wear off with extended use but the bottom left corner probably gets the least use on my pad so it will likely last a long time.