Page 2 - A Closer Look - Hardware and Software
Turtle Beach describes this mouse as a "wireless ergonomic gaming mouse". I think this is a good description of the intention of this mouse, so we are here to examine the merits of this product in use. Like previous models in the Kone series, the Kone II Air is an asymmetrical mouse for right-handed users. This means the shape of the shell is higher on the left than the right plus a thumb grip. Meanwhile, its shell surface material is composed of a smooth, white plastic. Note the Kone II Air is also available in black. Turtle Beach's logo is printed in silver in the back of the shell. Two translucent strips run along the left and the right for RGB LED lighting. The sides are not textured, but are reasonably grippy during use.
The Kone II Air comes in at 110g, which is quite heavy by 2024 standards. For reference, it is not nearly as light as my daily driver, the Kone Pro Air, at 75g. The recently released Burst II Air is 47g. Mice that are lower weight are desirable for first person shooter and multiplayer online battle arena games, especially if you want something for quick, swift movements. However, the extra weight means it comes loaded with more buttons, a thicker shell, and more RGB LEDs. The mouse's center of gravity is near the middle, which almost lines up with the sensor at the bottom.
The Turtle Beach Kone II Air is large by 2024 standards when it comes to physical dimensions, measuring in at 130.2mm deep, 82.6mm wide, and 44.1mm tall. These are very close to the Kone AIMO my colleague Aaron Lai reviewed back in 2018. You can see the mouse is built for average-sized hands based on these numbers, but if you have smaller hands, it will be a bit harder to handle. I am a palm grip type user myself, and the Turtle Beach Kone II Air fits quite well. Just for fun, I gave it a claw-type grip, and it is not bad to use it at all. My hand size is pretty average, so this is good news for the majority of the users.
A 1.8m PhantomFlex braided cable leads out from the front of the mouse via a short cable guide. A paracord cable would have been better, but you probably will not need the cable much thanks to the 130-hour rated battery life over wireless and 350 hours via Bluetooth. The mouse connects via a USB Type-C plug, which is expected in 2024. The cable is used for charging, and when connected, the Kone II Air becomes a wired mouse. The Kone II Air connects to your computer via a non-gold-plated USB connector. When we bring about the question of whether gold plated connectors are actually useful or not, let us just say if it was the actual pins, then possibly, since gold offers better conductivity than other metals. This theoretically establishes a better connection with your computer, but on a digital signal level, it is a discrete one or zero. If anyone tells you they can tell the difference, you can defeat their theory with a double blinded test. Additionally, if you are referring to the gold part of the connector you see on the plug, it is used for ground and does not make any physical contact electrically with your computer. In other words, it is nice to have, and it is pretty to look at, but it is not anything significant on a practical level. The lack of a gold-plated USB connector will not have any performance impact on the Kone II Air even in wired mode.
The Turtle Beach Kone II Air comes with six physical programmable buttons for up to twenty-one functions, not including the 4D free spin scroll wheel and free spin toggle switch. I have not used a free-spin scroll wheel since the Logitech G500, which was fourteen years ago -- how time flies. Combined with the previous image, you can see besides the standard left click, right click, and clickable and left/right tilt-capable scroll wheel, there are two buttons above the thumb grip. Behind the scroll wheel, at the apex of the mouse, are two buttons. The one closest to the wheel is the aforementioned free spin toggle switch, while the second one is the programmable one. Beneath the thumb grip is an Easy-Shift[+] button, which is like hitting the Function key on your keyboard: Holding it down will shift everything to its secondary functions. This creates a total of twenty-one programmable inputs. I found all buttons and switches to be within easy reach of my fingers, but will not be easily actuated by accident in a normal grip.
Beneath the buttons, the Turtle Beach Kone II Air features pre-tensioned Titan Switch Optical switches that have a rated lifetime of 100 million clicks. These are the same switches found in all their products in the last few years. The aim of these switches is tactile, reliable, and quick response. Obviously, these wordings are paraphrased from Turtle Beach's website, the real question is, are they any good in real life? In my opinion, they are excellent. The clicks are reasonably quiet, yet audible, giving a substantial feel to it. I did not notice any gaps with the switches. The Titan Switch Optical's response is distinct and can be considered to be very clean.
The Turtle Beach Kone II Air features a dual-zone RGB LED illumination system, but in reality, it is not a true independent dual-zone system. I would consider it more of a 1.5-zone system. This is because the colors bleed into each other so much that you cannot even tell where one zone ends and the other begins. The zones are one LED under the translucent scroll wheel and two near the front of the light strips, with the second zone near the back of the light strips. The color of the LEDs can be configured to virtually anything in software by a custom color palette; more on this later. Different lighting effects, speed, brightness, and even battery status can be set for different profiles in Turtle Beach's Swarm II software. The battery status lighting setting will have all the LEDs off and blink red occasionally if the battery dips below 10%, breathe red between 10% and 20%, glow solid green at 100%, and breathe orange or green in between.
A shot at the bottom of the Turtle Beach Kone II Air optical mouse. Keeping the plastic base gliding above your mousing surface are two heat-treated pure PTFE feet, which is also known as Teflon to the common person. In organic chemistry, ethylene/ethene indicates a carbon-carbon bond with two carbons and a double bond (C2H4). Tetrafluoro replaces four hydrogen atoms with fluorine atoms, making it C2F4. In non-scientific terms, poly just means a bunch of them linked together.
The Turtle Beach Kone II Air is powered by the Owl-Eye 26K optical sensor, which is based off the PixArt PAW3395 capable of sensing up to a jaw-dropping 26,000 DPI sensitivity, but can drop as low as 50 DPI at 50 DPI increments for those who want it. It is not 1 DPI increments seen in some high-performance models, but I doubt anyone needs that level of precision adjustment. It promises 650 inches per second tracking and acceleration of up to 50g. 1000Hz polling rate is standard, but can be lowered to 500Hz, 250Hz, or 125Hz. No sensor rattle is noticed.
The mouse allows five profiles to be stored on board. Profile switching can also be done in software, but you can also map a button to cycle through them. The wireless USB transceiver can be stored underneath the mouse for convenience. Although the Turtle Beach Kone II Air is Bluetooth compatible, the transceiver provides support for the company's proprietary Stellar Wireless technology. According to Turtle Beach, it is a reliable low latency protocol for improved gaming performance. This is especially important for a wireless mouse. The Kone II Air is NVIDIA Reflex compatible. A slider switch at the bottom lets you switch between Stellar Wireless, Bluetooth, or turn the mouse off.
Turtle Beach promises up to 130 hours of battery life via Stellar Wireless and up to 350 hours via Bluetooth. Turning on the RGB LEDs will drop the battery life. I have been using it using standard lighting over Stellar Wireless, and given how long the battery life is, I never really ran out of battery before plugging it again.
The Kone II Air works along with the latest version of Swarm II, which we have seen with their recent products like the Burst II Air and Atlas Air. This program unifies compatible Turtle Beach peripherals into one application. After installing the corresponding device module, you will be prompted to update the mouse firmware. Updating the firmware was a quick and painless process, but it will require the mouse to be plugged in. This is no different than other wireless products I have used.
After selecting the Turtle Beach Kone II Air from the main screen, the graphical user interface uses a continuous single page design with three sections: DPI-Settings, Assignment, and Illumination. Under Settings, you can customize items like the five preset sensitivity settings, polling rate, angle snapping, and lift-off distance, as shown in the screenshot above. Button Assignment, as its name suggests, allows you to assign functions to different buttons. These include macros, DPI, Easy Shift, Profiles, System and OS, Windows Functions, Browser, Multimedia, Open, and Timer. Note not all functions are available for every button. The macro manager allows you to directly link to actions from a preset list of games such as Apex Legends and Fortnite.
With regards to the lighting effects in the Illumination screen, there are seven options. These are AIMO, Colorwave, Fully Lit, Heartbeat, Blink, Breathe, and Battery Indicator. Although the user interface says the brightness and speed levels can be adjusted with the battery indicator, no such options exist -- it is completely not customizable. A better way of doing it is allowing the user to customize the RGB LED color and effects based on battery level.
One bug I noticed was Swarm II will show the Kone II Air as disconnected when it goes into idle. Not just standby or energy saving mode, but just idle after 30 seconds. This is very annoying, as it will exit the Kone II Air's configuration screen and go back to the home screen.
Overall, I found Turtle Beach Swarm II to be a significant user interface improvement over Swarm. Keep in mind this is not just a user interface overhaul, but rather a separate piece of software. This means compatible older devices will need to be migrated over, or otherwise be left behind with Swarm. I wish the left menu automatically expanded or at least provided tooltips when hovering over icons, so the user does not need to click before figuring out what the icons mean.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look - Hardware and Software
3. Subjective Performance Tests
4. Conclusion
