Page 4 - Conclusion
Did the Turtle Beach Kone II Air with its free spinning wheel combine the goodness of the Kone lineup with one of Logitech's best features? I have to admit, flying through webpages on the Kone II Air using the free spinning wheel reminded me how much I missed it since I last used the Logitech G500 on my desktop over a decade ago. I still have the legendary mouse in my basement somewhere, but I have moved on otherwise since then despite being such a big fan of the wheel. So when I heard Turtle Beach brought it along with the Kone II Air, I was excited, and their implementation certainly did not disappoint. This, combined with the Kone series' ergonomic shape, pre-tensioned Titan Switch Optical switches, and long battery life made it all the better. I also like the good number of well-placed buttons. Under the hood, the PixArt PAW3395-based Owl-Eye 26K sensor performed wonderfully. As for the software? Swarm II is definitely an improvement over Swarm; something we have been complaining about for longer than I can remember. There are some key areas of improvement with the Turtle Beach Kone II Air. To address the elephant in the room, the Kone II Air is simply way too heavy at 110g. The Burst II Air is 47g, so what made the Kone II Air more than twice as heavy? This mouse neither has the quantity of buttons nor the hardcore RGB LED effects as the Kone XP Air, and even the Kone XP Air is 11g lighter. The Kone II Air does not have a true dual zone RGB LED system either. Lastly, while Swarm II was an improvement over Swarm, it can use some further UI refinements and bug fixes. For about $120 at press time, the Turtle Beach Kone II Air is a solid mouse with the free spinning wheel as the star of the package, but you will need to decide whether that is worth the extra grams on the scale.
Turtle Beach provided this product to APH Networks for the purpose of evaluation.
APH Networks Review Focus Summary:
7/10 means Great product with many advantages and certain insignificant drawbacks, but should be considered before purchasing.
6/10 means A product with its advantages, but drawbacks should not be ignored before purchasing.
-- Final APH Networks Numeric Rating is 6.4/10
Please note that the APH Networks Numeric Rating system is based off our proprietary guidelines in the Review Focus, and should not be compared to other publications.
The Turtle Beach Kone II Air optical mouse combines one of Logitech's best features, the free spinning wheel, with the Kone series' tried-and-true ergonomic shape and excellent Owl-Eye 26K sensor, but its 110g weight is a bit porky by 2024 standards.
Page Index
1. Introduction, Packaging, Specifications
2. A Closer Look - Hardware and Software
3. Subjective Performance Tests
4. Conclusion
