Software

The Kone Pro Air is compatible with ROCCAT Swarm, which is used for other ROCCAT devices as well. Though a bit crowded and dated in its design, Swarm leaves little to be desired in terms of functionality. All options are accessible through separate pages. The first of these includes the basic Windows pointer settings and CPI adjustment, which ranges from 50 to 19,000 CPI and for up to five levels. Typically, the 3370 allows for CPI adjustment in increments of 50 until 10,000 CPI and increments of 100 from 10,100 CPI onward. On the Kone Pro Air, increments of 50 can be entered across the entire range, though I do not know whether this is intended or merely an oversight, and the non-standard values aren't actually applied. CPI values can be entered manually, but non-native values are truncated to native ones. The second page has button remapping options, which allow one to remap all buttons to mouse, keyboard, or media functions, and EasyShift allows one to designate a shift button that can be pressed to access a second set of bindings. Though the Kone Pro Air lacks a dedicated CPI button, this can be easily rectified by binding "DPI Cycle" to the profile button on the bottom. The third page concerns lighting options and is detailed below. The fourth page features miscellaneous options, such as polling rate adjustment (125/250/500/1000 Hz), LOD (very low/low/custom), and angle snapping (on/off). By default, LED sleep timer is enabled, which turns the lighting off after a set period of inactivity. In order to disable this option, "None" ought to be selected. In addition to that, wireless settings include an "Energy Saving" option. Enabling this lowers illumination brightness to 30% when moving the mouse if used wirelessly. Lastly, a macro editor and profile management are included as well.

When applied, all settings are saved to the on-board memory, so the software does not need to be running (or be installed) all the time. On my system, the software had a RAM footprint of 105 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the task bar, but goes down to 44 MB upon closing the application (minimized to the system tray). Oddly, I've noticed Swarm hogging the CPU quite a bit, to where I've encountered FPS drops and hitching in games, which wasn't the case when I was using earlier versions of Swarm for reviews. Upon exiting the application, all processes are terminated, as they should be.

Lighting

The Kone Pro Air has but a single physical zone for RGB lighting, which is the front of the main buttons. A total of seven pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software. These are AIMO, Wave, Fully Lit, Heartbeat, Breathing, Blinking, and Battery Indication. For most effects, it is possible to set custom colors and adjust brightness as well as transition speed. By now, a dedicated "Lighting Off" option has found its way into Swarm, which allows one to conveniently disable all illumination. Oddly, "Lighting Off" retains the speed and brightness sliders, which serve no purpose whatsoever.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I go through the AIMO, Wave, and Breathing lighting effects. Please note that the dithering seen in the lighting is a recording artifact:

Battery Life

According to ROCCAT, the Kone Pro Air has a battery life of more than 100 hours if used in 2.4 GHz mode without any RGB lighting and a polling rate of 1000 Hz. Swarm includes a percentage-based battery level indicator with double-digit granularity; i.e., steps of 10%. In addition to that, an estimation of remaining battery life in hours is given. From what I can tell, these values are not based on the same calculation, as despite the battery sitting at 100%, an estimation of 63 hours has been given at one point and an estimation of 53 hours at another. Additionally, the estimation does not take setting changes, such as RGB lighting, polling rate, or energy-saving, into account. In short, I consider it highly inaccurate and thus useless. This assessment is further corroborated by the fact that after continually using the Kone Pro Air in 2.4 GHz mode with all illumination disabled and at a polling rate of 1000 Hz for roughly 15 hours, the battery indicator was still sitting at 90%, and an estimation of 47 hours remaining was given. Thus, I'm unable to give any sort of estimation on expected battery life, though if taken at face value, the numbers cited by ROCCAT appear to at least be within the realm of possibility.

After not moving the mouse for three minutes straight, the Kone Pro Air enters a sleep state from which it can be woken up by either moving the mouse or clicking any button.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I've measured the charging speed of the Kone Pro Air during the constant current (bulk) stage to be around 0.231 A. The battery comes from ChangHong Grand-Pro Tech Co. and has a capacity of 450 mAh.