“DJI’s $199 Neo selfie drone is going to be everywhere,” we wrote in September — whereas noting that the price range self-flying drone did have two main weaknesses over the competing $350 Hover X1. First, DJI’s drone didn’t shoot vertical video (a dealbreaker for TikTok and Instagram Reels influencers) and second, it couldn’t track our movements almost as rapidly because the competitors.
However DJI is now fixing each, including vertical video and dramatically rising the Neo’s flight velocity whereas monitoring. According to DC Rainmaker, it’s now so quick it may possibly sustain with cyclists, and surprisingly flies sooner in monitoring mode than it does with a controller.
Earlier than the firmware replace, the drone wasn’t in a position to sustain with him biking at even 13 miles per hour (21kph). However after the replace, he noticed an enormous enhance to roughly 20 miles per hour (32 kph). That’s sooner than you may manually fly the drone, even in Sport mode, so hopefully DJI will quickly allow us to entry that velocity enhance for FPV flying as properly.
The vertical mode is arguably extra thrilling due to the social video platforms the place your footage can now extra simply reside — however a pair caveats it is best to know. First, restricted to the Neo’s pretty grainy 1080p mode, not 4K, although you may go as much as 60fps. To my eye, it seems about nearly as good because the Neo’s 1080p horizontal filming mode.
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Screenshot by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
Second, you’ll have to replace your DJI Fly app, not simply the drone — in any other case, the choice to for 9:16 vertical video merely gained’t seem in lots of flight modes. And should you’re on Android, meaning updating the app from the app itself, and probably reassuring your Android telephone that it’s okay to put in, as a result of DJI hasn’t put its app on the Google Play app retailer for a while now.
