Turtle Beach Kone 2 Air Gaming Mouse Review: A Great Midrange Wireless [CNET]

The mouse improves on its predecessor.

Most 90’s kids who were into gaming growing up might recognize Turtle Beach as an audio company that grew up with the PC, including making great Xbox headsets. That’s certainly still true, it’s also been expanding into the PC gaming arena for the past several years turning out all kinds of solid accessories for both casual and hardcore gamers alike — mostly through acquiring companies. In this case, that means the Kone gaming mice line it inherited from its acquisition of Roccat five years ago (and subsequently dissolved the brand). The Turtle Beach Kone 2 and Kone 2 Air offer some significant upgrades over the original Roccat Kone series mice. 

You can get it in either black or white, wired (about $60) or wireless. The Kone 2 Air is the wireless model, which connects via cable (via its “tangle-free” PhantomFlex cable), Bluetooth, or with a 2.4GHz wireless dongle. 

Whether to go with wired or wireless really comes down to preference and budget. The wired version has the least amount of lag for those who need the fastest response time, and it’s only $69 (£69). Going wireless gives you much more flexibility and portability, plus you don’t have to deal with any annoying cables. It’s also quite a bit more expensive at $119 (£119). I didn’t notice enough of a difference in the lag or response time between the wired and wireless versions to be a deal breaker for me, and you can always plug in the Air with the bundled cable if you need to. $119 is not at the highest end of the spectrum for gaming mice, but it’s certainly not insignificant. 

The first thing that hit me when I started using the Kone 2 was how light it is. At 110 grams, it’s at the low end of middleweight. My daily mouse is a Logitech G502 Hero (121g without the optional weights) and I instantly noticed a difference. 

It also feels really nice. The original Kone was known for its great ergonomics and the Kone 2 continues that tradition with a smooth and comfortable grip. Turtle Beach claims it’s more suited for medium and large sized hands, but it fit comfortably in my small hands using a Palm Grip. The matte finish is nice, but a tad slippery. Thankfully, there’s grip tape in the box.

For gaming, feel is only half the story. The buttons need to be solid and responsive too. It’s a delicate balance because if they’re too stiff, it might take too long to click, and you could miss that game-winning headshot. If they’re too smooth, then they’ll feel mushy, making it hard for you to respond with a quick subsequent click. The scroll wheel can shift between free spinning and tactile. 

The Kone 2 still uses Titan Optical switches and the 26,000dpi 650ips Turtle Beach Owl-Eye sensor. The switches provide a very tactile feel and a fast response. The PTFE skates on the bottom let it glide quite nicely across nearly any surface. 

As great as the hardware is on the mice, their best asset is the customization options. You can adjust, quite literally, every button and setting. You can change the polling rate up to its maximum 1,000Hz, increase the liftoff distance (DCU in Turtle Beach parlance) to help improve tracking response and tweak the debounce time — how long it waits to register the next press — to optimize the speed at which clicks register.

There are plenty of other settings you can tinker with in the Turtle Beach Swarm app and you can set all of these to different profiles as well to quickly switch from work to play. All this customization is nice, but it’s also quite easy to get overwhelmed with everything happening in the app. 

It wouldn’t be a proper gaming mouse without being able to customize the RGB as well.The pair of dual-zone RGB light strips running down the top of the mouse and the light around the scroll wheel are adjustable. 

Turtle Beach claims up to 350 hours of battery life with the Kone 2 Air when using Bluetooth and up to 130 hours of gaming when using the wireless transmitter, but as usual, your mileage may vary. That rating’s high compared to many other gaming mice. If you crank up the RGB, or any of the other customizable settings, battery life drops. I couldn’t run down the battery completely in my testing, based on my usage. In about six hours per day of work with an average of about one hour of gaming, it dropped to 20% over two weeks, which extrapolates to about 118 hours.    

There’s no denying that the Kone II mice are squarely targeted at hardcore gamers. The top-notch build quality and extreme levels of customization allow gamers to fine tune the Kone 2. The best part is that it’s a pretty decent daily mouse too.