Over the last year, consumer drone miniaturisation has come forward in leaps and bounds. Portable options like the DJI Mavic, AirSelfie and the Hover Camera Passport allow quick and easy ways to take selfies from a distance or high angles.

SELFLY, a new Kickstarter attempts to bump that trend up a notch by squeezing a drone so small, that it acts as your phone’s case.

The SELFLY is indeed a tiny package, coming in with a 9mm thickness and weighing at just 70 grams. It comes in two parts, the drone itself and the actual docking bay for it that latches onto supposedly any 4-6 inch sized mobile phone. When a moment to use the SELFLY arises, the owner can detach it and control it using their mobile phone.

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That piloting system itself seems pretty nifty for something so compact. The SELFLY software is apparently compatible with both iOS and Android and is described as having stabilised autonomous flight, meaning it will hover in place once positioned. It also will come with facial recognition, pan, and follow modes to construct some artsy shots on the move.

When it comes to mechanics, we were a little let down at the 8MP resolution, which is outclassed by many existing smartphone cameras. Also don’t expect it to act as a phenomenal action camera since its top video setting is just a good (but not great) 1080P at 30FPS. This is perfectly fine, especially considering its marketing as a budget gadget but we are increasingly seeing 12MP as the current standard for drone cameras, along with 4K (or at least 1080P at 60FPS) video quality. By the time SELFLY is due to release in June 2017, these specs will look even clunkier.

The real issue we have is the matter of the relatively short battery life. In order to keep this thing small and cool, SELFLY is packing a mere 650mAH battery. The specs list this as providing just five minutes of flying time before the juice runs out. Why this is especially troubling is that (once again in a likely move to conserve space) the battery is in-built, so you can’t just lock and load another charged battery once it’s empty.

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There are other more niggling concerns. Though the SELFLY has been supposedly designed to latch onto a smartphone’s back in such a fashion as to keep a phone’s primary camera unobscured, this isn’t really the case. In reality there is only a space provided for smartphones with top-left-aligned cameras such as the iPhone or Huawei P9. Users of centre-aligned camera smartphones from brands such as Samsung and LG will find their smartphone cameras totally covered.

What’s more, even though an iPhone will technically be able to see out, the shape of the SELFLY when attached still shields a lot of light getting to the lens. We’re also guessing that many unfortunately positioned smartphone speakers getting blocked and muffled out. It’s a little bit silly for a drone that supposedly opens up new functionality for phones to cripple a device’s existing features like this. We’re a little surprised that the design team didn’t go with making SELFLY work like a passport flip open case for phones to avoid such problems.

However, all these rough edges aside, we cannot resist how cool the SELFLY is. Within the DigitalRev office, several cries of “want” broke out at seeing it. The appeal of being able to flip out a flying camera in such a portable fashion cannot be denied. It’s affordable price is also incredibly tempting with a US$100 purchase price for Kickstarter backers and a planned cost of US$140 at retail. With over US$21,800 of its US$125,000 goal raised in a day (with 44 days to go), it’s very likely that consumers will overlook the small problems SELFLY has to embrace its big potential.

You can find out more about SELFLY on the Kickstarter page

2017-1-25 03:00