Corsair Voyager Air review: Flawed, but still excellent

The Corsair Voyager Air is basically a USB 3.0 portable drive that comes with a built-in Wi-Fi access point to offer mobile data sharing and HD content streaming. It's not the first device of its kind. The Seagate Wireless Plus (which is preceded by the Seagate GoFlex Satellite), and the G-tech G-Connect have been on the market for years.

8.0

Corsair Voyager Air

The Good

The <b>Corsair Voyager Air</b> offers up to 1TB of storage to an existing network and is capable of wirelessly streaming HD content to a max of eight concurrent Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices. It can also relay Wi-Fi Internet access, is a fast portable drive, and comes with both wall and car chargers.

The Bad

The Corsair Voyager Air's mobile app doesn't support certain popular file formats, and fails to automatically organize content by type. The device needs a faster Wi-Fi standard, and should allow for Internet sharing via its network port.

The Bottom Line

Despite a few shortcomings, the Corsair Voyager Air is an excellent way to extend your mobile devices' storage capacity and features.

However, the Voyager Air has features that the other two lack individually. It has a Gigabit network port (the Wireless Plus doesn't) and a built-in 7-hour battery (the G-Connect sorely lacks this). For this reason, I find it the most complete package among its peers, for now.

It's still not perfect. The new mobile storage device uses a slow Wi-Fi standard, has no network port-based Internet sharing, and comes with a simplistic mobile app. These are minor shortcomings, that can be (and will likely be) addressed via firmware and app updates.

For frequent travelers with lots of digital content to carry or those looking to share mobile hot-spot Internet with multiple Wi-Fi-enabled devices, the Corsair Voyager Air is an excellent buy. It currently costs $220 for 1TB (or $180 for 500GB). The Wireless Plus is great alternative if you're looking for something a bit cheaper.