I’m not a drone guy. In fact, I’ve always been a bit nervous to play around with them too much. They’re big, fragile, and expensive, which is a dangerous combination for someone with my hand-eye coordination. But I’ve always sort of wanted one, mostly because I’ve been jealous of the mid-air photos and videos I’ve seen other people pull off.
DJI has been trying to make the smaller, simpler, cheaper drone to win over people like me for a while. It nearly got there with the $199 Neo, but that was held back by basic obstacle avoidance and odd omissions like no portrait video recording. The fold-down Flip benefits from more advanced features, but at $439 is too expensive for first-timers like me, and rival HoverAir’s X1 isn’t much cheaper at $349.
The Neo 2 solves those problems. At £209 / €245 (around $280 — though there are no realistic hopes of a US launch now that DJI has been banned from the country) it’s pricier than the Neo, but still undercuts other rivals, and benefits from camera upgrades and improved, though by no means perfect, obstacle detection. It’s small and light enough to fly almost anywhere without worrying too much about complex regulations, can capture great footage and photos without the need for any controller at all, and has the manual control and FPV flight options needed to double as both toy and flying camera.
Sure, it has its limits. More powerful drones might have better cameras, faster speeds, or longer battery life, and there’s a place for all of that. But that’s not where I am right now, and if you’re not either, then the Neo 2 is probably all you need. It’s an affordable, low-risk way to figure out that flying a drone is pretty damn fun.
The first thing I did was throw the Neo 2 in my backpack and head out for a run, leaving the controller at home and my phone in my pocket. Let’s call this the “drones for dummies” use case, and it’s fittingly at about my level.
At 151g, or 160g with the optional extra transceiver attached, the Neo 2 is a little heavier than the first Neo, but still light enough to carry around pretty easily. Plus, it’s well below the 250g line that serves as the cutoff for more onerous restrictions and regulations in many countries.
The Neo 2 is light enough that you can fly it almost anywhere, even in city parks.
It takes a couple of button presses to turn the Neo 2 on, and from there the on-device controls are simple: two buttons on the side cycle through the drone’s default automatic flight options, while a long press lets you adjust parameters like the drone’s height, distance, or filming angle. Then you hold the drone flat in your hand, tap the dedicated start button, and it’s off.
The Follow mode is the one likely to get the most use, and it does a great job. You get plenty of control over the Neo 2’s positioning, distance, and angle, and while the top speed of 12m/s (about 26mph) is slow compared to larger drones, it’s fast enough to comfortably keep up on a run — though may lag behind on faster bike rides.
Obstacle detection is the other reason it may lose you, and you will have to keep an ear out for any telltale changes in the whine of the propellers. I made a point of walking and running amongst trees, and while the Neo 2 could confidently reroute around the trunks in its path, it did occasionally get caught up in low-hanging branches, spindly and hard to spot without any winter foliage. The first time this happened it clattered about a bit, got itself free, and quickly corrected course to find me again; the second time it couldn’t escape and simply shut its propellers down, stranded in the tree, leaving me to pluck it out of the branches. I was able to break the tracking by hiding behind an especially large tree trunk, at which point the Neo 2 hovered in place, unable to find me, but if you’re not actively trying to trick the drone it does a good job keeping you in its sights.
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