Hands-On with the Voodoo Envy’s Wi-Fi Power Brick

Before sending our pre-production Voodoo Envy back to its home, we just had to play around with its unique power brick, which Voodoo calls an Aura PowerConnect. The square AC adapter is heavy and might be a bit chunky, but its hidden powers redeem its larger than average size. The brick doubles as the Voodoo Envy’s very own portable 802.11b/g wireless access point.

Voodoo fears that you may only have a wired connection in certain situations, so you can plug an Ethernet cable into the RJ45 jack on the PowerConnect then watch the Voodoo logo light up as the AC adapter starts broadcasting a wireless signal. A point-to-point Wi-Fi connection is established between the brick and the Envy, which does not have an Ethernet port of its own .

Though our unit is pre-production and Voodoo hasn’t put the finishing touches on it, the Aura PowerConnect worked flawlessly. As soon as we plugged an Ethernet cord into the port, it created an unsecured network with the an SSID of “Aura PowerConnect” and we were able to connect the Envy to it.

Even though Voodoo reps have said on their support form that the PowerConnect will only accept connections from an Envy, we were also able to connect other laptops to the network, but we are unsure if this will be a capability on the final production unit. We are also unsure if there will be a way to configure security settings or to change the default SSID.

Even more impressive was the range of the brick’s signal. When we walked close to 100 feet away from the access point, we continued to have a decent connection and no problems navigating to graphic heavy sites. We took the notebook through our entire office and we were able to connect in every room we tried. We even got a decent signal when we walked out the door, and down the hall. In terms of raw speed, the Aura PowerConnect transferred data at solid speeds of 9.87 Mbps from 15 feet away and 6.67Mpbs from 50 feet away ( we did not do numeric transfer tests at greater distances).

Note: None of these numbers should be considered final since ours was a pre-production unit. Perhaps, the final build will be even faster.

Don’t believe us? Check out the video of us carrying the Envy through the office and out the door below.

Related:

Hands-on with the Voodoo Envy’s Instant-On OS

Unboxing the Voodoo Envy

Voodoo Envy 133 Mini-Review: Air Killer?