I have been waiting for this kind of control in Autocad for 15 years. I use it for 2D drafting only. Silky smooth zooms and pans for precise drafting. No more holding the middle mouse button and dragging in the middle of a command. You can keep your hand on the knob for a long time with all of the programmable buttons at your touch. After a month of use, going back to my MX Revolution mouse to navigate feels clunky and frustrating. I also use it in Photoshop to pan and zoom and it is like second nature moving around in your image. I love this little thing. Connects effortlessly in Vista, acad 2009, and CS4.

I love this thing! For years I've been using the mouse and keyboard. Now I can't work without the 3D connexion SpaceExplorer. Very intuitive navigation and programmable button capability reduces the time it takes me to design with Pro/E and Inventor. I highly recommend this device for anyone working in 3-D.

Product functions well. It would be nice to have more indents on some of the buttons so your fingers don't get lost. One major complaint I have is with the protective rubber coating around joystick. The coating is thin and made of rubber and started coming off whithin a month of use.

The hype is true. This mouse does make SolidWorks faster and more pleasant. The learning curve (adjustment period) is about 15 minutes. Some fiddling with the setup may be required, but this is relatively painless. In short, I love it. But...

It has an annoying habit of not working from time to time. If you look long enough, an internet search will reveal a "reboot" procedure where you hold the 1 and 2 buttons down while plugging it into the USB port. You'll want to make a note of this, because I have to do it fairly often. Without the reboot, the mouse occasionally will not work. As in completely dead. I had to find this little secret reboot tidbit on the internet after an hour of frustrated fiddling around. I called tech support and received decent help, but only after answering a dozen marketing survey questions that I found to be invasive and annoying. My mouse was dead and they wanted to know my number of employees etc before they'd answer anything.

That said, I'd buy another one if this one died. I just wish the company spent some of their marketing/data harvesting budget on fixing the reliability issue.

The advanced ergonomic design, offers effortless navigation when I'm using SolidWorks. This is a great time saving CAD tool. As the product description states; "Simply push, pull, tilt or twist the controller cap to simultaneously pan, zoom and rotate 3D objects and environments." It is really is that easy. The only negative, the price.