Software

The S480 Max comes with its own lightweight software. All options are accessible through four different tabs. The first page has miscellaneous settings such as profile management, polling rate adjustment (125, 500, 1000, 2000, 4000, or 8000 Hz), sleep time (0–30 minutes), debounce time (0–15 ms), and lift-off distance (0.7/1/2 mm). In addition, angle snapping (on/off), MotionSync (on/off), and ripple control (on/off) are present. MotionSync synchronizes SPI reads with USB polls at the cost of a motion delay penalty of up to an entire polling interval, whereas ripple control introduces smoothing at higher CPI steps to lessen jitter, increasing motion delay in the process. The second page allows for button remapping to mouse, keyboard, media, and macro functions. The third page has a macro editor. The fourth page houses CPI adjustment settings for up to six color-coded levels, ranging from 50 to 30,000 CPI in increments of 50. Values can be put in directly by double-clicking the value instead of using the slider, but when doing so, any non-native values are not truncated to native ones.

All settings changes are saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 39 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the system tray.


As an alternative to the regular software, the S480 Max may also be configured through a web driver, which connects through WebHID and therefore will, at least as of now, only work on Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, and Opera (desktop). Aside from a different look, the web driver is functionally identical, aside from the battery charge indicator showing a percentage.

Battery Life

Phylina does not provide any battery life numbers. Even though the software does include a segmented battery charge indicator, it lacks the granularity required to gauge expected battery life. The web driver does show a percentage, but either it does not work or the threshold was not met. As such, I'm unable to gauge expected battery life.

Sleep mode is entered after three minutes of inactivity by default, but can be adjusted within the software.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I measured the charging speed during the constant current stage, which sits at 0.220 A when lifted and 0.206 A when not lifted. The battery has a capacity of 300 mAh (3.7 V) and utilizes a 3-pin JST connector.