Razer Joro & Basilisk Mobile review

Gaming on the go has become big business in recent years, but lugging around your full-size mechanical keyboard and chunky gaming mouse isn’t the most practical way to do it. Razer reckons it’s found the answer in the form of the Joro keyboard and Basilisk Mobile mouse, but I’ve got some serious reservations about both of them.

I’ll start with the Joro, because this is the one that I feel falls short the furthest. This is a low-profile scissor-switch keyboard that’s designed to be stuffed in a bag on your travels, and to that end it does well. Weighing just 381 g on my scales and measuring 30 cm across thanks to its 75% layout, this is certainly a highly portable keyboard.

But it’s got some serious drawbacks that are pretty hard to ignore. For one thing, the Joro is set at an uncomfortably low angle that cannot be adjusted. After a few hours, I started for feel the strain in my arms, which is never a good sign.

For another, the board’s scissor switches feel slow and sluggish compared to what you might be used to from a mechanical keyboard. The low-profile keycaps are harder to find by touch in the heat of battle, while they’re also incredibly prone to picking up smudges and fingerprints.

It’s not all bad for the Joro. Its gaming performance was surprisingly passable for a keyboard of its type, and the addition of Razer’s Snap Tap tech is welcome. The subtle RGB backlighting looks beautiful, too, although it absolutely kills the battery life—Razer says you’ll get about five hours with it set to 100%, and while my testing got it closer to seven and a half hours, it’s not something you can really enjoy for all that long.

With the Joro, it feels like Razer has prioritized some of the wrong things. The keyboard has a solid aluminium chassis and laser-etched keycaps, but a painfully uncomfortable typing angle and subpar battery life. The former are nice to have, for sure, but I’d rather it excelled with the latter.

And then there’s the price. At $140, the Joro is outrageously expensive for what it offers. Compare it to a run-of-the-mill Bluetooth keyboard and its main advantages are Snap Tap and scissor switch keys, but even the switches struggle to impress. The board doesn’t offer much more in terms of portability, comfort and typing feel over a cheap Bluetooth board. Would you be willing to pay such a premium for short-lived RGB lighting and laser-etched keycaps? I’m not sure I would.

Razer Basilisk Mobile

What about the Basilisk Mobile? The good news is that Razer’s mouse is a much more positive affair than the Joro. The bad news is that it’s still a long way off the best gaming mice you can buy today.

Like the Joro, the Basilisk Mobile’s main selling point is portability. Yet it stretches that definition with its 77 g weight, which is noticeably more than my Logitech Pro X 2 Superlight’s 60 g heft. The Basilisk Mobile is shorter than my Superlight, but taller and wider, so it’s hard to call it particularly compact.

The upside of this is that in making the Basilisk Mobile fairly normal in terms of dimensions, Razer hasn’t had to make too many sacrifices in the name of portability. It’s comfortable and ergonomic in the hand, and it still packs in three side buttons for your thumb.

The rear-most of these is a dedicated AI Prompt Master control. This brings up a box that lets ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot rewrite your emails and summarize web pages. Why you’d want this on a gaming mouse isn’t exactly clear, and it really feels like an attempt to shoehorn AI into a place where it’s not needed. You’ll probably want to disable it so you don’t start accidentally AI-ing in Warzone.

Still, the Basilisk Mobile’s buttons are satisfyingly clicky and the scroll wheel is accurate, helping it perform well in a variety of apps. Its gaming performance is good too, and I never felt like its relatively small stature put me at a disadvantage (I don’t need any help to miss my headshots, thank you).

But the crux of the matter is that the Basilisk Mobile is a decent gaming mouse precisely because Razer hasn’t had to make too many concessions for portability—the opposite of what makes the Joro such a disappointment.

Yet it’s still very hard to know who the Basilisk Mobile is for. There are smaller and lighter gaming mice if you prize portability, and there are stronger performers at roughly the same dimensions. It’s caught in an awkward no man’s land, which makes it tough to recommend.