Software

The Kone XP Air is compatible with ROCCAT Swarm, the software used for other ROCCAT devices as well. These days, Swarm is clearly showing its age. Much like on the Burst Pro Air, the incredibly slow update process for the mouse is notable. Be prepared to sit in front of a progress bar for at least five 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 is only present in wired mode, where it doesn't even apply. Thankfully (?), the setting appears to be dysfunctional anyway, so it's not much of a loss. The "energy saving" option, which is supposed to dim the lighting when moving the mouse, still reacts very slowly, to where its usefulness is strictly limited, as it takes several seconds for the mouse to even register that it's moving. In general, "slow" is a fitting description for working with Swarm, as setting changes take several seconds to apply. Lastly, the Kone XP Air has a certain fondness for reverting to its default settings. I've had multiple instances where the mouse would suddenly change CPI to default steps, or default to the lowest CPI step when turning it back on, or go back to default settings entirely (including illumination) upon turning it back on. The only way to make the mouse remember what I've set it to previously was to open Swarm. Lastly, I've found that rebinding buttons apparently doesn't work at all.

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 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 XP 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). 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. Not using "auto-apply" is recommended, however, as several settings simply won't be applied at all when doing so. On my system, the software typically had a RAM footprint of 92 MB on average when running in the foreground, which doesn't change when minimized to the task bar, but goes down to 33 MB upon closing the application (minimized to the system tray). All Swarm-related processes display noticeable CPU usage, which increases to even greater levels when interacting with the software. Upon exiting the application, all processes are terminated, as they should be.

Lighting

The Kone XP Air has five physical and logical lighting zones distributed across the scroll wheel and back of the mouse. A total of eight pre-defined lighting effects are available in the software. These are AIMO, Wave, Fully Lit, Heartbeat, Breathing, Blinking, Battery Indication, and Photon_FX. For most effects, it is possible to set custom colors and adjust brightness as well as transition speed. Thankfully, the "Lighting Off" option has made a return, allowing one to conveniently shut off all illumination entirely.

Color accuracy and vibrancy are excellent throughout. Here's a short demonstration video in which I go through the AIMO, Wave, Breathing, and Photon_FX 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. 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, which makes gauging expected battery life difficult. For the record, after six hours of continuous use in 2.4 GHz with illumination enabled for the majority of time, the indicator stood at 70%, although it showed 80% (or 255%) at other times, too.

After exactly 60 seconds of inactivity, the mouse enters a sleep state, which shuts the lighting off as well. This applies regardless of what the LED sleep timer is set to.

Using the included USB Type-A to Type-C charging cable or the charging dock, I measured the charging speed during the constant current stage, which sits at around 0.236 A. The battery has a capacity of 450 mAh.