Roccat Kone AIMO
Evolutionary advancement
CAN WE ALL JUST take a moment to appreciate how frigging difficult it is to find a good mouse? Seriously, the list of trending pixel pointers is seemingly endless. Couple that with the variety of hand shapes and grasping preferences out there, and a severe lack of places to try these critters outside of the realms of cyber-space, and what you’re left with is a headache. A headache, and an overreliance on reviewers and YouTubers using poorly sized banana analogies to compare size. As if that’s some hilarious joke we’ll all collectively laugh at. It’s a tough one, that’s for sure.
So, what should you be thinking about when it comes to the perfect mouse? Well, there’s its weight and shape—are you a lefty or a righty? Do you need it to be wired? Are you a gaming professional? An office user only? Or would you prefer an all-arounder? What about sensors? Laser? Optical? Do you want one with low jitter? How high do you like your DPI? Adjustable lift-off distance?
We could go on for days and bamboozle you (and arguably us, too) with specs and design choices, but what the average user should be looking for ultimately is a good all-arounder. A mouse that looks at the market, goes “Huh, this is all rather complicated,” then takes the very best of everything, and uses it in such a manner that you barely even notice it’s there. Oh, and slaps on a $80 price tag, too. Not so expensive that you spit out the morning cup of joe all over our mag, but also not so cheap that you lose out on all those subtle features.
The Kone has long been Roccat’s mainstay product. It’s a mouse brand that pulled the company from obscurity and gave the German manufacturer a sizable chunk of market share—and with good reason. It was solid, it looked good, and it did everything you wanted it to, without fuss, without worry, and without milking your bank account. That, however, was over 12 years ago, and today we’re witness to the Kone AIMO.
There have been some considerable advancements since then. The design is more ergonomic. The material, although not rubberized, is now a soft, satin plastic. The buttons are intelligently placed, within easy reach of your thumb. And the lighting is encapsulated in beautifully frosted plastic, so it can better diffuse those RGB LEDs.
OWL FAITHFUL
The showpiece, however, is the PixArt PMW3361 optical sensor, located at the heart of the device. Arguably the most important piece of this puzzle, Roccat is calling this its Owl-Eye sensor. It’s essentially a slightly tweaked variant of the PMW3360, custom built for Roccat, and is currently regarded as one of the best sensors in the business. Held up high by the likes of the top 1 percent of esports enthusiasts and athletes who earn way more money than makes sense, the PMW3360 is by far the best sensor out there.
Why, you ask? Well, it all comes down to how the PMW3360/61 handles hardware acceleration—basically, there isn’t any. Below the 2,500 dpi mark, there’s little to no smoothing. What you get is what you give, which means that precision is assured—whether you miss or hit the shot, it’s on you, not the mouse, not lag, you, and there’s something quite satisfying about that.
The saying goes, “A jack of all trades is a master of none,” but that isn’t the entire quote; it ends with, “But oftentimes better than a master of one.” In the end, it’s far better to be versatile and adept across multiple spectrums than a specialist in just one area, and there’s no better example of that ethos made manifest than the Kone AIMO. Yeah, it isn’t absolutely perfect. It’s not superlight, it doesn’t have all the buttons, it’s not got a rubberized finish, there isn’t a plethora of macros, or a plastic cable, and it doesn’t support every single style of grip perfectly. But what it does do is combine the best of what it can, in a way that’ll never let you down, and for that we absolutely commend it.