Hands-On With the Voodoo Envy’s Instant-On OS
July 15th, 2008 by Joanna Stern
The Voodoo Envy 133 has a lot of striking features. Its got a more than elegant design, its power brick doubles as a wireless connection point and its got facial recognition software. Oh and its 3.4-pounds and thinner than Calista Flockhart. But what makes our mouths water is that it isthe first laptop to land in our hands with Splashtop’s instant-on mode (see our Splashtop FAQ).
Voodoo calls its Splashtop instant-on environment the Voodoo IOS and instead of having to wait until Vista boots up - in what can be more than a minute on some laptops - the Envy 133 launches users into an environment where they can surf the Web within 15 seconds (verified by our hands-on experience).
We have a lengthy video below of our experience booting up into IOS on a preproduction Envy 133 and a tour of all its Splashtop applications. When you first boot up the system, it will launch a main page with the Voodoo logo on a black background in 5 seconds.
This start page has seven buttons on its bottom dock, including a shutdown, launch Windows, browser, music player, photo viewer, Pidgin chat and Skype shortcuts. You have to click on one of those buttons to enter the real IOS environment. In our testing, when we clicked on the browser button, it took an additional 10 seconds to launch the complete IOS mode and the FireFox browser.