Lofree Touch PBT hands-on review: Stylish mouse with wireless weirdness

Despite its minimalist looks, the Lofree Touch PBT wireless mouse is surprisingly feature-rich and comfortable to use. Its compact design, solid build quality, and wireless connectivity make it a promising candidate for a wireless travel mouse. It also tracks incredibly consistently across a variety of surfaces, with or without a mouse pad, but a buggy Bluetooth connection and laggy 2.4 GHz put a damper on the excitement. 

The Touch PBT is quite customisable, thanks to its interchangeable mechanical keyboard-inspired buttons and easily removable back panel, for which Lofree sells replacements in a variety of different themes. These customisations, along with the cute OLED screen for DPI adjustments and mouse status, make the Touch PBT a great option for those who value portability and aesthetics but don't need a high performance mouse. 

The Touch PBT's $69.99 price also makes it difficult to recommend, since there are alternatives with better performance for significantly less. 

The Lofree Touch PBT is available from both Lofree and Amazon at $69.99 in both the plain off-white Tofu colourway and the orange, grey, and cream Block colourway we tested. On Lofree's site, there are also $79.99 bundles that include alternative “keycaps” and top cases with three different design themes. 

The Lofree Touch PBT is a wireless mouse that puts aesthetics and build quality at the forefront. The Touch PBT has a nifty OLED screen for status and battery life indication and side-mounted backwards and forwards buttons for easier web navigation. The Touch PBT offers no software customisation, but buyers can swap out the back shell cover and the keycap covers for a touch of added hardware customisation. 

The unboxing experience of the Lofree Touch PBT is rather unexceptional, but not without highlights. The box features a nicely printed design, appears to be made with environmentally-conscious materials. Inside the box is the Touch PBT mouse with a very flexible paracord USB type-A to type-C cable. Aside from some documentation and a brief user guide, there are no other accessories. 

In terms of hardware, the Lofree Touch PBT is phenomenal from both a design and build quality standpoint. The decidedly retro colour scheme, tiny OLED display, and mechanical keycap-style mouse buttons give it a unique, charming aesthetic, and the mouse is very sturdy, thanks to thick plastic mouldings. The solid build quality and choice to use PBT instead of something like ABS mean that the Touch PBT still looks brand-new, despite over a month of heavy use. 

The Lofree Touch PBT is surprisingly small, although Lofree's product photography make it seem much larger than it is. Despite the compact size, though, it is comfortable to use in both a palm and fingertip grip, although users with larger hands will find it difficult to use the Touch PBT in anything other than a fingertip grip. Gaming isn't ideal with the Touch PBT, since the polling rate maxes out at 500 MHz, but it is perfectly acceptable for non-competitive games that don't demand peak performance. 

The Touch PBT has both Bluetooth and 2.4 GHz wireless connectivity, and there is even a neat magnetic storage compartment for the 2.4 GHz dongle in the bottom of the mouse. Connecting to Bluetooth is quite simple and intuitive, and the connection was stable throughout our testing, but it was not without other issues. 

The biggest issues we encountered with the Lofree Touch PBT's wireless connectivity came from latency and interference. When connected to a OnePlus Pad for daily productivity tasks, the mouse would work fine initially, but connecting it to the tablet alongside another Bluetooth peripheral, like a keyboard, introduced significant lag that made the mouse unusable. There was also a minor increase in latency when using the Touch PBT connected via 2.4 GHz, compared to the wired USB type-C connection.

This means that anyone particularly sensitive to lag or input latency will be stuck using the Touch PBT in wired mode only. Battery life was also rather good, given the Touch PBT's compact size, and you can find a table below with observed battery drain and estimated battery life for the 2.4 GHz connection. Using Bluetooth would extend this dramatically, but it is not recommended due to aforementioned connectivity bugs. 

While the Lofree Touch PBT has some excellent retro aesthetics, decent battery life, and a surprisingly comfortable shape, we found some issues with its connectivity that hold it back. With a little more polish, or if you don't need to use the Bluetooth connection in conjunction with a Bluetooth keyboard, it could be a great wireless mouse for someone who often works away from their desk. The lack of software customisation and high price also make it a difficult recommendation.