Nulea M501 trackball
31 January 2025For a very long time I have been partial to the Logitech M570 wireless trackball, going as far as repairing them but the one I used with my laptop finally surrendered to years of rough treatment. These days even a refurbished M570 can go for around £60 and the successor M575 is not that far behind new, but for whatever reason Amazon pointed me towards the Nulea M501 which at the time was £25 so decided was worth a try. I bought it about this time last year but it was only when I joined my current company a little under three months ago I started properly using it.
Looking at the comparison picture above the M501 to me looks like a knock-off of Logitech's M570 and I do wonder why Logitech isn't taking legal action againt either Nulea or Amazon, but that is an issue for them rather than me. All I will say here is that I am reasonably impressed with the Nulea M501 and it was less than half-price of both the Logitech M570 and M575 at the time I bought it but it has its quirks.
How it felt
The main practical difference is the Nulea using a built-in power cell that is recharged via USB whereas the two Logitech trackballs use AAA batteries. There are arguments either way for which approach is better but the Nulela does come with the possibility of leaving it permanently plugged into USB although so far I have yet to see it run out of power. In the past I used the Logitech Trackman Marble which is basically a wired ancestor of the M570 and I have no problem with wired trackballs, but for some reason under Linux the Marble did not have the sensitivity of the M570 that I had become used to so I standardised on the M570 everywhere. In total I have bought at least five M570s.
The one quirk is having to press a button to reconnect the Nulea M510 if it has not been used for what I think is around half an hour. I usually leave my Logitech M570's switched on and even after several days away they automatically reconnect when I try moving the mouse cursor around, so it felt odd that just sitting down and using the Nulea did not move the mouse cursor around. A minor issue and one that the lower price tag makes acceptable.