Build Quality

Overall build quality is very solid. When shaking the mouse, a minor rattle comes from the side buttons. When applying lateral pressure, minor creaking but no flexing of the shell can be observed. Activating the side buttons by squeezing the sides is impossible. Lastly, no accidental clicks occur when slamming down the mouse.

Buttons

Main buttons on the Kone Pro Air are good to very good. Pre-travel is low and post-travel moderate, resulting in a firm and fairly snappy button response. Though the buttons are more uniform than on my copy of the Kone Pro, both buttons still suffer from a somewhat dull and muted click feel. By comparison, the buttons on my Burst Pro copy felt a fair bit snappier and more satisfying to press. Button stiffness is medium to light. Despite being visually separated from the shell, lateral button movement is low and needs to be provoked; i.e., is not noticeable during typical use. ROCCAT-branded optical switches are used here.


Side buttons are very good. Pre-travel is low and post-travel moderate, resulting in a snappy button response. However, their construction lends them a somewhat hollow feel even though the pressure point is mostly even across the entirety of these. Button placement is great as actuation is possible very easily by rolling one's thumb across. A pair of TTC switches (white plunger) is used.

At the bottom of the mouse is a single button for cycling through the five profiles, which works just fine. A tactile switch from TTC is used for this one.

Scroll Wheel

The scroll wheel is very good. Scrolling is a bit noisy, but tactility is on point, with clearly discernible steps and a matching tactile feel when scrolling. Oddly, scrolling is much stiffer on the Kone Pro Air than on the Kone Pro, and even the wheel click is considerably heavier. The encoder comes from TTC and has a height of 5 mm. The middle (scroll wheel) click requires high force for actuation. A tactile switch from TTC is used here.

Coating

The Kone Pro Air has a smooth matte surface all over. The sides feature a line pattern, which adds a bit of grip. It doesn't attract fingerprints, dirt, or the likes too much. It is easy to clean, and there are no signs of wear left after doing so. All in all, excellent materials.

Button Sound Test

Disassembly

Disassembling the Kone Pro Air is easy. The screws are located beneath the two big feet. In order to comply with Japanese regulations, one of them is a Torx T6, whereas the rest are Philips. After those are taken care of, top and bottom shell can be separated. The former is clipped in at the front, so nudging it back and forth a bit might be necessary. When putting it back together, I recommend placing the top shell straight onto the bottom shell, but leaving a slight offset to the front, and then pushing it forward to clip into the front.

As the Kone Pro and Kone Pro Air share their tooling, their internal design being virtually identical is expected. Above the PCB, a plastic assembly is erected, which supposedly stabilizes the shell, along with providing a structure the vertically mounted side buttons attach to. The assembly also carries the battery. The scroll wheel is embedded into a second plastic assembly, which presses down on the wheel switch. The PCB itself is short and wide, and the main button switches have been rotated by 90° to accommodate that fact. No less than six screws are used to affix the fairly thin PCB to the bottom shell. The MCU is a Nordic nRF52840, whose datasheet can be found here.


As for the soldering and general quality of the PCB, I'm unable to find any noteworthy flaws.