Review: XtremeMac Luna Voyager

review by Bill Palmer

Back at Macworld Expo in January of 2008, while being given a tour of the XtremeMac booth, I spotted a super-slim iPod/iPhone alarm clock called the Luna Voyager. Excited by the prospects I asked for a demo but was told that it wasn’t a finished functioning unit. Fast forward twenty-one months, so long a span of time that XtremeMac has since become part of Imation, and the fully functioning Luna Voyager has finally arrived. And it’s even tinier than I remembered.



Which is a good thing, of course, as traveling with something like an iPod alarm clock can be a pain if it’s too large, particularly with luggage restrictions of late. Minimalistic in every sense, the Voyager only has two tiny visible buttons and a wheel, with recessed speaker grilles on each side. Not much more than an inch tall, the product looks vaguely like an external hard drive laid on its side, both in terms of size and styling. But plug it in (or pop in batteries) and the front lights up with the time of day in bright blue. Drop your iPhone or iPod into the centered dock on the top, set the alarm with a few buttons (the Voyager can automatically set the time of day by getting it from your iPhone or iPod), and you’re off to the races. You can even make a “Luna” playlist in iTunes and wake to that instead of the most recent song played.



Any iPod/iPhone alarm clock is going to necessarily draw comparisons to iHome’s leading line of similar products, and in this case I was expecting the Luna Voyager to square off directly with iHome’s similarly portable iP27 product. However, putting the two next to each other, the iP27 suddenly looks monster-sized – something of a revelation considering how many thousands of miles I’ve traveled with the iP27, and never thought of it as being oversized until now. Actually come to think of it, iHome’s earlier iH26 was smaller than the current model, but the Luna Voyager is significantly smaller than even the iH26.



With that revelation, my expectations for audio quality changed altogether. And as it turned out, my revised expectations proved to be correct. The Luna Voyager sounds merely okay. Impressive audio for its size, actually, but it’s immediately apparent how they managed to get it so small in the first place. I wouldn’t mind waking up to it every day, but the compromise comes when you consider using it for music playback during the rest of the day when you’re fully awake. Whereas the iP27 sounds (just barely) good enough to be used as an all-day speaker system while on the road, the Luna Voyager just doesn’t cut it in that department.



None of which is to distract from its appeal when it comes to its strictly intended use, which is to allow you to wake up to your own music. In my tests I found that the two buttons didn’t suffer in their ease of use due to their tininess, and the alarm fades in with a gradual volume increase, as I’d hoped it would. And the Luna Voyager manages to accomplish with two buttons and a wheel (plus two switches on the back) what it took iHome nine different buttons to pull off on the iP27. Still, I can tell you from experience that traveling with a product like this usually means that you’ll be in a hotel and looking to use it as a daytime playback device at one point in your trip or another. And the Luna Voyager doesn’t sound that much better than the middling speakers built into my laptop.



When it comes to the value proposition, the $79 Luna Voyager comes with basically nothing, whereas the $99 iP27 comes with a remote control and velcro carrying case. Pick up the Luna Voyager for its current $62 price on Amazon.com and it becomes a much better value, but the bottom line is that the product’s lone significant feature is that it’s slim and light and therefore very easy to fit into your suitcase.



I’m just not sure how many users would want to bother lugging along an iPhone alarm clock, even one this tiny, if they’re only going to get this kind of audio quality when they get there; it just has the feeling of “niche product” written all over it. That having been said, this product does one thing and does it really well, and I actually look forward to traveling with it on trips where I need to pack light or when I know I’m not going to have any idle time back at the hotel to use it for daytime music playback anyway.



I suppose I’m personally disappointed with the results because I’ve had high expectations for it the past two years, and it’s turned out to be merely mortal after all. But you’ll probably eat it up if you’re a part of the niche that the Luna Voyager is squarely aimed at.

Learn more about the Luna Voyager at XtremeMac.com.