One of my favorite gaming mice of all time comes from Roccat, and it’s the Kone XP Air. It’s a truly wonderful mouse with wireless connectivity, excellent ergonomics, gorgeous RGB lighting, and a stylish charging dock included in the box. However, it also costs over $200, which isn’t all that much when compared directly to my other all-time favorite, the $350 Razer Basilisk V3 Pro, which costs $350 if you also want the charging puck included.
However, the new Roccat Kone Air, priced at $139.95, offers a lot of the same functionality, great ergonomic design, and excellent performance as its more expensive sibling, but for much less. It uses the same 2.4GHz Stellar Wireless and Bluetooth to connect to your devices, and it has an excellent Owl-Eye optical sensor and Titan Optical switches.
On top of all that, it has an 800-hour battery life — even if that battery is a replaceable AA. Roccat is far from the first to give us a gaming mouse that uses replaceable batteries; the excellent Razer Orochi V2 showed us how good that can be. And after using the Kone Air for over a month and still having 100 hours of charge left, I’d say Roccat have put together a solid gaming mouse that would greatly appeal to mobile gamers.
Roccat Kone Air Review
The Kone Air is immediately identifiable as a Roccat mouse. It leans heavily on the design of the wired Kone, only getting rid of the cable. There are no ports on it to connect a USB-C cable at all, so if you run out of battery, you’re out of luck. The Kone Air is a large mouse, weighing 96g without a battery and 119g with one cell. It feels larger than the Kone XP Air to me, but it’s very comfortable to hold with all the right contours to fit your palm.
It has wonderfully textured rubber grips on the sides to ensure a firm hold. The thumb well is expertly contoured for comfort, and the Easy-Shift paddle returns and is still the easiest thumb button on any mouse I’ve used. The paddle basically acts as a shift key, doubling the number of functions you can get out of the Kone Air’s 9 buttons.
The main buttons once again use Roccat’s Titan Optical Switches, which are crisp and responsive with a rated lifespan of 100 million clicks. The scroll wheel is nothing special, and I sorely miss the infinite scrolling you get on the Logitech MX Master 3S and Razer Basilisk V3. The wheel also doesn’t support side clicks, and there’s absolutely no RGB on this mouse anywhere.
Pull off the back shell of the mouse to reveal the hollow interior where you can install one or two AA batteries. The choice will affect the overall weight of the mouse as well as the battery life. There’s also a handy docking bay for the Stellar Wireless USB dongle, a great feature for those who use the Kone Air on the go.
The Kone Air is powered by a 19,000 DPI Owl-Eye sensor with a 50g acceleration, which is very smooth and accurate across games and fine creative applications. The report rate of 1000Hz is slower compared to the 4K and 8K of some other mice, but for all intents and purposes, it’s more than enough for serious gaming and work. The heat-treated pure PTFE glides skate along my mouse mat with no issues, so twitch shooters won’t have any issues flicking and spinning around.
Helping things is the rock-solid 2.4GHz Stellar Wireless, which never once dropped or glitched despite being plugged into the back of my already crowded PC and right next to another wireless dongle for my keyboard. In 2023, I’m hard-pressed to notice any latency difference between wired and wireless mice, so if you were concerned about the lack of wired support on the Kone Air, don’t be.
Additionally, the Bluetooth connection is excellent with pairing especially easy thanks to Windows Fast pair support that detects the mouse as soon you as switch it to Bluetooth mode. And if you want to hit that 800 hours of battery life, Bluetooth is the way to go as 2.4Ghz connection is more power hungry. However, I’ve been using Stellar Wireless pretty much exclusively for a month now and according to the Roccat Swarm software, I still have over 110 hours of battery left — and that’s with just one AA battery.
Customization on the Kone Air is done through the Roccat Swarm software, and like its siblings, there’s a ton of things you can do with the combination of its 9 buttons and Easy-Shift function. I personally loved having my media playback and volume functions available when I press the Easy-Shift paddle, but you can literally do anything else you want. The software isn’t the most intuitive, but you shouldn’t have any problems working your way through it.
Verdict
For $140, the Kone Air ticks all the boxes for a wireless gaming mouse. It’s not the smallest thing in the world, but it makes up for it with excellent ergonomics, performance, customization, and very good battery life. This is a mouse that’s easy to recommend to anyone looking for a versatile mouse for gaming and productivity. The battery life alone and wireless capability make it a great recommendation for students who use gaming laptops for school and university. However, pro FPS gamers may need to look elsewhere given the sheer bulk and weight of the Kone Air. They would be better off with something like the Razer Orochi V2. For everyone else, the wealth of easy-to-use buttons is great for mapping Diablo IV commands. Roccat has made a great mouse that I am happy to keep on my desk for a long time to come.
