> Ever had a GoPro? Or professional camera? Drone? It's really not so hard to imagine a market for replaceable batteries lol. All three, in fact. GoPro is about 15 seconds from "battery empty warning" over safe shutdown, battery replacement and it's booted back up into fully working. Professional camera (Sony A7S2) about 10-15 seconds, depending on what BS the lens tries to pull on startup. Drone about 1 minute including landing/takeoff (DJI Mini 3 Pro). My Android tablet from Samsung however? Two minutes for safe shutdown and boot to userland alone plus all the apps starting in the background that keep yapping to whatever mothership cloud. It's an annoying hassle. And on top of that, despite the thing actually having a removable battery and being marked watertight and suitable even for underwater operation - it clearly is not. I'd rather have an actually watertight device that has guaranteed availability of spare batteries, and actual screws instead of that glue shit that can't ever be fully removed from either the display or the housing.
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I was unable to ever get it to fly reliably without GPS. It was probably stupid to drop $7K on drone GPUs and all kind of gadgetry (6 battery bay for rapid charging, etc), but it was just really really hard to pilot around in Maryland (Montgomery County). I would constantly have it throw up warnings and alerts, even only hovering a few feet above the ground for small scale testing. I would have to disable the GPS to do small scale testing, and then with GPS enabled, it would straight up not allow me to pilot it. When I moved to Miami, brought it down there, but I managed to find an apartment right smack-dab in the MIA no-fly zone as well. The smaller drone was allowed to fly though, so I eventually got a small Mini 2 IIRC, which was a lot easier to pilot, but I was just so disappointed in not being able to use the larger scaled up version. I wanted to do realtime facial recognition (not at scale, just to show that commercial drones can be turned into research demonstrators) on the onboard GPU (apparently just a NVDA Jetson from 2017 era) The irony is the M100 is genuinely great hardware - the payload capacity, the SDK access, the flight time with extra batteries. But DJI's geofencing treats the entire DC metro like a no-go zone, which makes sense from their liability perspective but means the thing is basically a $7K shelf ornament unless you want to deal with LAANC authorizations for every single flight.
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We can see the same with everything in the US. Huawei became very competitive to Apple. Outsold Apple in it's home market. Huawei got banned. DJI has a near monopoly on drones. No US company could compete and players like GoPro shut down their consumer drone projects. DJI got/is about to get banned. Tiktok was dangerous to Meta. TikTok got almost banned/forced-sold. Chinese EVs are better than almost any US offering. Chinese EVs got banned (by 100%+ tarrifs on them). Sale of AI and Chips to China got banned. No ChatGPT or Claude offered to us here in Hong Kong. This is all the US Tech sector can do now. Short term this will go very well but long term this leads to the US falling behind and behind because American companies have artificially created barriers where they aren't forced to comepete anymore, meanwhile the world moves on and has a competitive environment. Innovation will move faster Ex-USA I fly a DJI Mini 5 Pro, use a Huawei Freeclip 2 earphone, a Huawei GT6 watch, a Xiaomi Silicon Carbon powerbank, an Oppo Find N5 foldable. Most are better/unique compared to what you can even get in America. And that's only the beginning. That's only 2025.
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Neither of these things are true. You don't have to update firmware, firstly. Secondly, the fact the drone and the controller "use wifi" doesn't mean that they're connecting to arbitrary wifi access points. The drone controller (at least for the two drones i had) is a WAP, itself, a real strong one, and the drone connects to the controller. You don't need a phone to fly a DJI - the phone connected to the controller via USB cable provides telemetry and real time video. If you just want to fly the drone around and maybe capture some cool video, that doesn't require a connected phone. Source: owned a dji mini and own a DJI mini 2, very close friends with people who own the mini 3 and other, more expensive ones (with the video screen built in to the controller). I fly mine and use an old oled android phone as the video/telemetry screen - no sim card or cellular connectivity. I can take the whole setup to the middle of a forest with no connectivity at all and it will connect, fly, and record telemetry and video on the phone and on the SD card in the drone.
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Their newer drones support DJI RC[0] so you don't have to worry about installing their app on your phone and giving all the permissions. I use it with my DJI Mini 3 Pro, another advantage is that you don't have to worry about phone battery [0] https://www.dji.com/rc