Roccat Kone mouse & Taito pad
Feature
Does the Kone really embody a revolutionary power? We got our hands on the Kone, and the simultaneously released Taito mousepad, to find out more.
As mentioned before, the Kone comes equipped with a four-way mouse wheel. Fashioned from very grippy, soft rubber, the wheel feels very comfortable. However, the wheel doesn’t have any sort of texturing, presumably for aesthetic reasons. The left and right click resistance is just right, although it feels as if the travel isn’t quite the same on both sides. As with any other high-end mouse, the wheel can also be pressed down and used as middle mouse button. Pressing the mouse wheel feels snappy and tight, there’s no discernible wobble. Our only complaint here is that the wheel is rather narrow and generally small, which can make it somewhat difficult to use if you have large fingers.
Customisability
Just like any other gaming mouse, the Kone includes on-the-fly DPI switching. While the actual DPI levels can’t be set, you can choose from one of six presets (800, 1200, 1600, 2000, 2400 and 3200 DPI), and again, this is all you’ll really need. While it’s nice that there’s a button each for switching up and down, there’s sadly no way of telling which DPI setting you’re actually using at the moment.
A real highlight of the Kone is the lighting system. Two fiber-optic “lightrails”, as well as the ROCCAT logo, can be set to display any color you wish using the included driver. A really cool feature is that the lightrails have two LED sets, one at each end, so if you set the top set to display red, and the lower set to display yellow, you’ll see these two colours at the top and bottom of the fiber-optic tube, while the the middle section will be a gradient between the two colours selected. This lets you create some really neat effects, and is a lot of fun to play around with. What’s more, the driver also lets you set special effects for the colors – you can let them rotate around the mouse, or switch up and down, or left to right. You can even have them pulsate or blink, and even set the speed at which these effects happen. Naturally, you can also choose to deactivate all lights on the mouse, should you feel the need to do so.
A final feature of the Kone is the so-called TCU, or Tracking Control Unit. This is a small camera on the underside of the mouse. Now, this may sound like a fairly stupid place to put a camera, but ROCCAT has put some thought into this. The idea behind the TCU is that no two mouse-pads are the same. Some are made from hard plastic (or even metal!), while others are made from soft textiles. The problem is that the laser sensors in gaming mice must be calibrated for a certain type of mousepad material, on which they will perform best. But since there are so many different mousepads out there, almost all mice are calibrated for a “middle ground” between the two aforementioned extremes. Therefore, the mice never really perform as well as they could, unless you happen to own the perfect mousepad for your mouse.