AirSelfie showed its latest miniature camera drone at CES 2020 this week called the Air Pix, fixing many of the problems that its first drones had — most importantly being able to fly the damn thing.
Regular readers may remember our first run-in with an AirSelfie drone with our AirSelfie 2 review. It was perhaps one of the most disastrous review experiences that the author has had in 15+ years in tech news. Poor app design and testing initially locked us out of testing the drone at all, and once AirSelfie addressed that issue, the app was so bad it made our eyes hurt. It was like something you’d see on a 2009 iPhone.
Then the flying of the drone — if you can call it that. We had so many issues that we may have spent five minutes in total flying it because controlling it was that difficult.
Enter the Air Pix. While AirSelfie did attempt to right the ship last year with a set of new drones at CES 2019, this year’s new drone seems to check all the boxes for correcting what AirSelfie did wrong initially. The Air Pix includes autonomous flying capabilities, which makes keeping it in the air so much easier. The app is also much improved, and most importantly, the price is now just $99.
But AirSelfie is also promoting two higher-end pocket drones at CES, called the Air Pix+, and the Air Duo. The newest Air Pix drone adds an adjustable gimbal to the Air Pix frame, while the Air Duo includes both dual parallel and bird’s-eye cameras. Both are expected to be available later in 2020. Pricing for those drones was not disclosed.
While the Air Pix impressed us, we were more impressed with the Air Pix+ and Air Duo. Putting a gimbal — much less two cameras — on a pocket drone is pretty impressive, and with the flying and app issues fixed, the experience with these newest drones should be much more positive.
We hope to have the new drones to test in the not-so-distant future and have high expectations for a greatly improved experience. From what we saw here at CES, that looks like it will be the case.
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San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
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