By: Aaron Lai
May 8, 2015
If you look at the bottom of your receipt from restaurants and stores, you will often see some sort of text saying, "Tell us what you think!" This provides customers with the opportunity to return some feedback through a survey, or ask questions about the place. Often they come with an added bonus like better deals or chances of winning prizes, with a hope to get more customer feedback. Honestly, I never noticed this area until I started working in retail in 2012. Feedback is helpful for retail, as it allows the store to improve in the specific areas that require it. While it is good to strive for betterment in all areas, personalizing it to the clientele allows the store to focus in the areas where they are lacking. As a programmer, feedback is even more useful. Many principles of the Agile Manifesto encourages and requires constant communication between the developers and the customer. This way, the developers can understand the product requirements, and can deliver a solution that exactly fits the bill without any extras. Feedback also allows the development team to discover and fix any bugs immediately. Constancy and speediness of feedback is an essential for any functioning team. Thus, when XTracGear sent us their original Carbonic, the overall experience with the mousepad was a pleasant one. However, my biggest request for the Carbonic was to supersize it to an extra-large version. Fast forward to today, where XTracGear has taken these comments, and returned with the XTracGear Carbonic XXL. This gigantic mousepad is quite literally an expanded version of the Carbonic, with a few other tweaks too. Does it still possess everything positive from the original mousing surface? Or were some compromises made to make such a large pad? This review will definitely delve into these inquiries, so let us read on to find out!
Today's review unit of the XTracGear Carbonic XXL arrived from XTracGear's offices down in Salt Lake City, Utah. Traveling with United States Postal Service, and transferring to Canada Post, this box arrived in good condition. There is a slight dent showing signs of compression near the bottom of the rectangular prism, but otherwise there are no issues or causes of concern. I must say this is one of the most irregularly shaped boxes I have received before. The only odder box I have seen was a triangular prism, and it was used to ship a poster. Either way, this shape is quite understandable, especially when you see the retail container of the Carbonic XXL.
Here is the retail container of the product in question today. As this is much larger than the original Carbonic, rather than delivering the product laid flat, it is rolled into a rectangular box. As for this box, the name of the product is clearly labeled on one side. The other sides of the box are various pieces of information. One is the specifications in five different languages, which we will list below in English. Another side shows some features, which we will highlight in below, as well as in the coming pages. Finally there is some contact information on the final side. Much like the last XTracGear mousepad we saw, the top flap is labelled with "Open Here For Awesome", which is a pretty cool touch. Thus I will open for some awesomeness.
But first, here are the promised specifications and features, as obtained from the manufacturer's website:
Features:
- Polished textile surface
- Overlock stitch edges
- Enhanced Sure Grip comfortable open cell rubber backing
- High Definition (HD) carbon fiber repeating print on the surface
Specifications:
- 36" x 13" x 1/8" (91.44cm x 33.020cm)
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look
3. Subjective Performance Tests
4. Conclusion
