Me and My Selfie Drone: Life With a Snap Pixy

Are drones the brand new selfie sticks? Most individuals know Snapchat as a social community with bizarre face filters, but it surely additionally makes occasional novelty and future-aspirational merchandise: It is made sensible glasses, and now it is making selfie drones, too. Snap’s newest product, the Pixy, is admittedly extra like a flying digicam than a real drone. As Snap retains exploring new methods to take spontaneous photographs that may be uploaded to its app, the Pixy leaves the self-focused world of camera-equipped glasses for a number of moments and, as a substitute, flips the digicam again on… effectively, me.

My faculty reunion ended up arriving proper when the Snap Pixy did, so my means of testing the bright-yellow flying digicam was to take it an hour south to Princeton, New Jersey. I popped the drone in my bag, and off I went.

The $230 Pixy is compact, rectangular and light-weight. It has 4 propellers shielded by plastic, USB-C charging and a digicam on one aspect in addition to beneath. The aspect digicam is for taking pictures images and fast movies, whereas the underbelly digicam is for navigation: It could take off out of your hand, and in addition land again on it once more. Principally.

The Pixy is attractively packaged, however has no enclosed case. As an alternative, it has a bumper and carrying strap that may be slung over a shoulder. It is handy, however affords no safety from aspect influence or surprising rain. You possibly can’t get this moist.

Many locations do not enable drone flying, and I used this sparingly in very empty spots. The Pixy solely does a number of preset flight paths, from easy hovering, to a zoom-back-and-elevate wider-angle shot to a whole 360-degree rotation selfie shot.

It is an immediately eye-catching toy. Some folks knew immediately it was “that Snap drone,” and after I began making it fly I felt like I used to be doing magic tips on a road nook. The Pixy is easy to function: One button on high begins the flight path. You maintain the drone in your palm and make eye contact with the digicam. It then beeps, lights blink and it takes off. In the event you do not make eye contact, it blinks crimson and makes a tragic beep and will not transfer. 

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We Test Snap’s Pixy Selfie Drone

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With the rotating camera-mode wheel on top you can easily pick various preset routines (or standby, which imports photos and videos). The Pixy makes a clear, loud whirr when flying, but the noise isn’t too off-putting. The camera has some stabilization, but I found quick wind gusts made it sometimes wobble off course.

The Pixy’s navigation routines weren’t perfect: While the drone could track my face for several modes, it sometimes switched to stay focused on someone else’s face nearby. Also, the Pixy didn’t always make it to a landing in my hand; sometimes it gave up and just landed, and I had to catch it. One time, it landed in wet grass and bits of green ended up everywhere. I’m still cleaning it with a Q-tip.

The Pixy pairs via Bluetooth with the Snap app on iOS and Android, and it creates a local Wi-Fi connection with your phone to import photos and video clips. Most camera modes take video, but there are a few photo options. Clips and photos get imported into Snap’s app as Memories, not shared online. The footage can also be cross-saved to your Photos app automatically (I tried on an iPhone 13 Pro). But, there’s no way to remotely operate the drone with your phone. All interactions are automatic, or gesture-based; for example, the wide-angle landscape feature required me to wave my arm a certain way.

The Pixy’s four camera modes, Hover (stay still and turn to follow you), Reveal (pull back), Follow (moves to follow you) and Orbit (makes a big circle around you) can be tweaked to capture photo or video and change distance and record times (up to 60 seconds). The camera takes 12-megapixel photos and “2.7K” video, which look good enough to share, but not always as good as I would have liked. The Pixy has 16GB of storage that is supposed to hold around 100 video clips or 1,000 photos, but most of the time I just kept importing to my phone every hour to be safe.

One other thing I didn’t expect when recording video: There’s no audio. That’s common for little selfie drones like this, and of course, any microphone on the drone itself would be overwhelmed by the loud whirring of the blades. But of course, it means silent films. I started talking while recording the first few times and realized afterwards what had happened.

Video clips are limited to 60 seconds maximum each, and that’s because the battery life is extremely short. One full charge gets about five 30-second video clips, roughly. You can swap batteries, and I had a couple extra ones that Snap sent to us to test with. You’d need them if you ever planned to shoot clips for more than a few minutes. The $250 package Snap sells with two extra batteries and a charger is clearly the way to go.

That short battery life makes the Pixy feel even more like a novelty as opposed to an actual camera. Without a doubt, I had fun playing with it and showing it off. But I kept thinking about the selfie device that already works pretty well, has good battery life and is always in my pocket: my phone. Why would I ever really need a Pixy? I probably wouldn’t, which is good news for anyone feeling FOMO, since orders are currently backed up 13 to 14 weeks.

As a little taste of the future of toy robotics, however, the Pixy is intriguing. It’s just a lot more limited than even I was expecting.