The Pixie robotic illustrator flies on its own, performing pre-programmed patterns that put the focus on you as the user. It has great potential to cover occasions such as parties or tourist activities, capturing great aerial shots with almost no user intervention.
Snap calls itself a camera company, but its other image-focused products like Spectacles have had limited success, and the Pixie drone holds more hope because it can help users get more interesting content than they can with a phone or a regular camera.
Weighing in at 101g, the Pixie is small enough to fit in a bag or wear around your neck using the protective strap case. It proved surprisingly resistant to falls and accidents, coming out of many such accidents without a scratch.
The four fans are enclosed in a protective cover, so they cannot hit any obstacle. At the top is the start button and mode dial, with the battery compartment and charging indicator lights below. You’ll also notice a camera on the bottom, but it’s strictly meant to detect your hand and not take pictures or video when it’s there. And a USB-C port on the back lets you charge the drone and transfer files to your phone or computer.
The main camera captures 2.7K video at 30 frames per second and 12MP photos. And the shooting is done in 16:9 landscape mode, which is a bit strange considering that the snapshots are vertical. However, the app’s crop tool allows you to convert your shots to portrait mode.
The first thing you have to do is sync the device with your account via Bluetooth by putting it in standby mode, then pressing and holding the start button. From there, Snapchat detects Bixby and syncs everything over WiFi. Then, you can set the dial to one of four flight modes: hover, detect, follow, and orbit.
Once you have some clips, you can start editing them. And if you want to post on Snapchat, you can use the auto-crop function to convert to a vertical video, and you can then crop the video and add music and other effects, according to InGadget.
