“DJI’s $199 Neo selfie drone is going to be everywhere,” we wrote in September — while noting that the budget self-flying drone did have two major 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 nearly as quickly as the competition.
But DJI is now fixing both, adding vertical video and dramatically increasing the Neo’s flight speed while tracking. According to DC Rainmaker, it’s now so fast it can keep up with cyclists, and surprisingly flies faster in tracking mode than it does with a controller.
Before the firmware update, the drone wasn’t able to keep up with him cycling at even 13 miles per hour (21kph). But after the update, he saw a huge increase to roughly 20 miles per hour (32 kph). That’s faster than you can manually fly the drone, even in Sport mode, so hopefully DJI will soon let us access that speed increase for FPV flying as well.
The vertical mode is arguably more exciting because of the social video platforms where your footage can now more easily live — but a couple caveats you should know. First, limited to the Neo’s fairly grainy 1080p mode, not 4K, though you can go up to 60fps. To my eye, it looks about as good as the Neo’s 1080p horizontal filming mode.
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Screenshot by Thomas Ricker / The Verge
Second, you’ll need to update your DJI Fly app, not just the drone — otherwise, the option to for 9:16 vertical video simply won’t appear in many flight modes. And if you’re on Android, that means updating the app from the app itself, and possibly reassuring your Android phone that it’s okay to install, because DJI hasn’t put its app on the Google Play app store for some time now.
