If you find your fingers are generally a raw, bloody mess due to your boredom-induced nail-biting, or you’re driving your cubicle neighbors insane from your desk-drumming and pen-clicking, fidget toys might be the cure for your nervous or bored energy. Stress balls and desk toys have been around forever, but a recent trend in fidget toys adds a collectible, high quality — and often expensive — flair to finding a place to dump your excess energy.
 
The Good

When introducing testers or random passersby to a spinner, the conversation always went the same way. We’d tell them what it was and they’d have some sort of aggressively incredulous response, but then we’d put it in their hand and in a matter of seconds they’d say how much they like it and wouldn’t want to give it back — every single time, without fail.

It may not sound like it, but these fidget toys — the Cube included — could very well improve your day-to-day by giving you an innocuous outlet for your nervous or bored energy, and our testers unanimously found this to be true. Some of us played with the spinners instead of bit our nails and cuticles — I went from short nails and raw skin to being able to squeeze a lemon into a glass of water with no problem. Some found we were more present in our daily lives — fidgeting with the spinner on the subway and paying attention to our surroundings rather than burying our faces in our phones. A few of us noticed we got up from our desks less, dumping energy into fidgeting with the spinner rather than taking mindless trips to the pantry. Our engagement level with the spinners varied from tester to tester, but we all preferred having them around, and found ourselves reaching for it when we were doing things that didn’t require both hands, from editing an article to simply waiting for the elevator.

We also found that the spinners are a good conversation piece. People tend to wonder what in the world you’re playing with, and when someone actually recognizes them, it’s like an instant bonding moment. Funnily enough, after having a frustrating couple days at the Apple Store trying to get my phone battery repaired in a reasonable time, an Apple technician noticed my spinner, struck up a conversation, and smoothly helped me along the process. Some of us also found that the spinners scratched our collector’s and hobbyist itch. I kind of want to catch ’em all and display them on a shelf, whereas others looked into how to build their own.

 
The Bad

There’s one big potential negative we experienced with the spinners. Out of the handful of units we received for testing, the bearings on around 30% felt gritty within a few days to a week of frequent use. Even though each spinner has a tightened finger pad protecting the bearings, particulate still manages to find its way in. If this happens, the spinner becomes very grindy — you can feel the grind through the finger pads as it spins, anyone in the immediate vicinity can hear it, and the spinner loses a large portion of its maximum spin time. Unscrewing the pads to access the bearing is easy enough, but blasting it with a generous amount of canned air doesn’t seem to do the trick. Soaking the bearings in or spraying them with rubbing alcohol, carburetor cleaner, or acetone, then drying and blasting them with canned air helped a little, but they were still louder and more grindy compared to when they came straight out of the box.

It’s hard to say what caused some of the spinners to get grindy so quickly — even after cleaning — and identical spinners to remain perfect. We had multiple units made of the same metals, used by the same people in roughly the same manner, frequency, and spin speed. One titanium Torqbar got very gritty, and cleaning according to the MD Engineering’s own instructions only helped a little. The other identical titanium Torqbar never had a problem and remains smooth and quiet. The titanium Rotablade got gritty in just a few hours, and like the Torqbar, cleaning only helped a little, whereas the brass Rotablade didn’t have a problem despite very similar usage, and is easily the smoothest and quietest fidget spinner we tested. It makes sense that the spinners would get a little louder after extended use, but from our testing, the ones that didn’t fall victim to grit sound and feel as great as they did out of the box.

The Verdict

Everyone that has used either a Torqbar, Rotablade Stubby, or both, loves the spinners. Which brand and construction material people preferred seemed to simply be a case of personal preference. The various metals have different hefts, and the Rotablade and Torqbar have different shapes, finger pads, and accessories. The Rotablade also doubles as — and bills itself as — a cigar stand, if you’re into that. Most of us can’t get past the price tag of these high-end spinners, but we all want one, and we’ve all noticed positive effects from using them, however large or small.



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