Gadgetory

this product brings back some actually pretty amazing memories for me this promotional video for the original Voyager air was actually the first revenue generating project that we ever did for Linus Media Group that was a really uncertain time for us but we've kind of stuck together through the amazing journey that the last year-and-a-half has been and I feel like both my team and I have grown and changed so much as content creators in that time but what about the Voyager air how has it changed welcome to my video of the Voyager air 2 wireless media streaming drive from Corsair the jazz mini phone and tablet stand from Coolermaster is now available in a variety of cool colors from these great retailers click now to learn more out-of-the-box the most obvious changes the industrial design the Voyager air the red one in particular had an angular aggressive looking style to it that I personally really liked and while the bottom of this new generation product is bold and eye catching with a quality feeling soft touch finish on the blue part and a nice grippy rubber ring to keep it in place on the table unfortunately this design language didn't carry over to the top where instead we find an unexceptional matte and glossy black plastic affair thankfully the glossy plastic accent isn't easily scratched but it'll still always look smudgy no matter what you do because the buttons for power and wireless are both built into it which I guess leads pretty well into a physical tour of the unit on the front aside from the aforementioned buttons there are indicators for remaining battery power and DC power in then on the back there's a USB 3 micro connector for charging and data the courser includes a cable for as well as a 5 volt 2 amp power input just for charging but unfortunately Corsair doesn't include the cable for in fact the accessory package has been slimmed down in a few ways you no longer get a wall adapter a handy cigarette lighter - 2 amp USB adapter or an accessory pouch just a drive and a USB 3 cable and well normally I'd complain bitterly about this Corsair does get a pass here because they are passing along a significant price reduction to the customer so if you really want this stuff you can just buy it yourself and you won't be paying any more than the original Voyager air all right so enough staring at this black box what the heck does it actually do Linus great question inside you'll find a few things first is a 1 terabyte hard drive second is a wireless network card and third is a large 6,200 milliamp hour battery to power both of those other things the hardware on its own actually doesn't inherently do much it's all about the software with the Voyager air so start by powering up the drive and turning on the wireless interface wait a minute or two and using a smartphone or tablet there are apps for iOS android and kindle download the voyager air a p-- connect to the Wi-Fi hotspot the the Voyager air 2 generates on its own launch the app and start setting up your new toy from the settings menu we can configure wireless pass through so device is connected to the Voyager II r2 can also access the internet through another nearby network set up a password for the onboard Wi-Fi set up a DLNA media streaming server if you want and set up automatic sync for Dropbox or Google Drive a feature that makes the device much easier to load up prior to a trip or something very handy active transfers is the next button down the Voyager air 2 can either stream media like the old one or here you can see the queue of files that you've selected to cache locally on your device to save power I prefer this approach since less Wi-Fi streaming will cut down on battery use for both devices you can see and manage everything you've cashed in the download folder or by using any standard File Explorer program on Android anyway speaking of managing files one of the big complaints about early Wi-Fi drives is that you couldn't really do that through the included apps nowadays with the Voyager air 2 you can so you can view reorganize rename and delete stuff at will with the only drawback being it's a little bit awkward and it's not the only thing that's a little awkward about the UI the built-in music player is well integrated on iOS and you can swipe up to change tracks and whatnot whenever musics playing but on Android when you want to get at it you need to launch the whole app rather than Corsair throwing it in notifications or providing a widget and another quirk that I noticed here is that it's the only part of the Voyager air app where you have to press the top left of the screen to go back because swiping in from the left doesn't work which I guess since we're in there now is the last stop in our little tour so I showed the folder based navigation file management none of that stuff was really new in the Voyager air software but courser has added some other stuff some of which is not that important some of which is pretty great so using metadata and tags Corsair tries to organize your files for you in four categories music actually worked pretty well with it sorting by artist album etc and even doing a pretty good job of displaying thumbnails and whatnot but photos only really let me sort by a year videos didn't sort at all with any of my stuff even though Corsair said TV shows should split out by season and episodes so let me know if you guys have a different result there and documents ended up just being a bit of a mess of desktop.ini files subtitle files and other random junk that didn't fit into the other categories now they're kind of getting there but there are a lot of ways that they can continue to improve this and I think the big thing this thing right now is granularity how come I can only sort my Uncategorized videos alphabetically why can't I sort by whatever has been most recently transferred to the drive and then why isn't there a search function so I don't have to rely on tags that sometimes work or manually scrolling through endless lists of random files which I guess sort of leads me to another positive point it's got support for third-party media players now so you can use a player or VLC or whatever else instead of worrying about running all your videos through handbrake before transferring them to the Voyager air this is handy but my dream device would be even better than that while addressing the whole metadata thing I guess I'll need to wait a few more years for this but I'd really like to see something that has a Plex server running on it or something like that that transcodes media on the fly the Voyager air 2 has improved over the original one but not to that degree which leads us into our conclusion on the hardware side nothing from my big wish list has really improved there's still no dual band wireless a key feature for media streaming and the wireless still turns off as soon as you plug something in via USB meaning that without a DC plug adapter you can't power the drive off of an external source and stream at the same time on the software side while it's certainly not perfect it is better better enough to call it a sequel to the original one even know what's lacking the Ethernet port yeah tough to say especially since they're not getting rid of the original Ethernet equipped model and that one gets all the new software updates as well so this review puts me in a bit of a weird position where I have to call the name Voyager air 2 kind of misleading when it isn't better than the first one really in any way but I also have to give kudos to Corsair for supporting their 18-month old product with new software when they could have just as easily abandoned it and told their customers no you need the new Voyager air 2 for that so basically the same conclusion as last time it's a concept that I like even though its utility is limited to pretty specific use cases now with 30% more gen I guess speaking of concepts that I like today's episode 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