Software

The Burst Pro Air is compatible with ROCCAT Swarm, the software used for other ROCCAT devices as well. These days, Swarm is clearly showing its age. Most notable is the incredibly slow update process for the mouse. Be prepared to sit in front of a progress bar for at least ten minutes before being allowed to access any settings. In addition to that, several bugs (some years old at this point) are present. First of all, when switching between wired and wireless, Swarm may enter a state of infinite loading, which can only be exited by closing Swarm to the system tray and opening it again. Furthermore, the "LED sleep timer" setting simply disappears upon switching to wireless. This is doubly curious as its value does apply, but only if the default has been changed. Lastly, the "energy saving" option may be bugged. This setting is supposed to dim the lighting when moving the mouse and restore the set brightness when not moving the mouse. However, it takes exactly five seconds for the lighting to go to back to full brightness when the mouse is no longer in motion, largely defeating the purpose of this setting.

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 Burst 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. 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 RGB 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 typically had a RAM footprint of 115 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the task bar, but goes down to 50 MB upon closing the application (minimized to the system tray). All Swarm-related processes display noticeable CPU usage, increasing to even greater levels when interacting with the software. Upon exiting the application, all processes are terminated, as they should be.

Lighting

The Burst Pro Air has four physical and logical lighting zones: left and right main buttons, scroll wheel, and back of the mouse. 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. For whatever reason, the "Lighting Off" option that was present on the Kone Pro Air has vanished again, which is why lowering brightness to zero is the only way to disable the lighting entirely.

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.

Battery Life

ROCCAT states a maximum battery life of up to 100 hours. This figure only applies to constant motion in Bluetooth mode with illumination disabled (that is, lowered to zero brightness). Accordingly, numbers for 2.4 GHz at 1000 Hz can be expected to be significantly lower, especially with RGB lighting enabled with full brightness. While the software does include a percentage-based battery life indicator, it is far from reliable, thus makes gauging remaining battery difficult. For the record, after six hours of continuous use in 2.4 GHz with illumination enabled, the indicator stood at 80%, though at other times it also showed 0 or 100%.

After exactly 90 seconds of inactivity, the mouse enters a sleep state, which shuts the lighting off as well. This only applies if the LED sleep timer setting is left at default, otherwise that setting takes priority.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable, I measured the charging speed during the constant current stage, which sits at around 0.178 A excluding the additional current expended for the RGB lighting. The battery has a capacity of 500 mAh.