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Social media company Snap hasn’t had much luck making and selling hardware. Still, it’s trying once again – this time with a miniature drone for taking casual photos and videos. This is the kind it hopes you’ll share on its messaging app Snapchat.
The Pixie is a square $230 drone in a bright shade of yellow. It’s the size of your palm and is designed to require as little drone-flying skills as possible. The toy-like design tries to make the flying camera so friendly that people can ignore any privacy implications.
Snap Chief Executive Officer Evan Spiegel announced the drone at his Snap Partner Summit on Thursday. The Pixie – which can be ordered now but ships in 11 to 12 weeks – captures photos and video of the same quality as a modern smartphone. It has no controller and instead floats up from your hand to do its business and then back down.
Social media companies have been trying to break into hardware for the past few years. Spiegel has been using the line that Snap is a “camera company” since its initial public offering in 2017. However, actual cameras from Snap are in short supply.
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The company’s foray into hardware began with the original Spectacles, a pair of hyped-up sunglasses with cameras in the frame that could only be bought at smiling yellow vending machines—or at resellers who set up shop around them. The company last released a pair of camera glasses to the public in 2019, and has since focused its efforts on its next-generation Spectacles, the first wearables with built-in displays for augmented reality .
Facebook’s parent company Meta last year released similar specs, called Ray-Ban Stories, that can shoot video and photos with tiny built-in cameras. The company has not released sales numbers for the product.
The Glass-with-camera category has raised concerns from experts about privacy and surveillance, with Google’s own effort going back to Google Glass. Adding a small, hard-to-spot camera and microphone to a standard accessory can make it easy to take hands-free video and photos, but it’s difficult for subjects to know when they’re being recorded and give consent.
Snap was rumored to be working on a drone by 2017, and after those rumors solidified last year, the company finally managed to build its own flying camera. The official launch of Snap’s drone technology put the company in competition with incumbents like popular Chinese drone maker DJI.
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Other companies have tried, and failed, to make similar casual drones. GoPro launched its doomed Karma drone in 2016 and discontinued it less than two years later. ZeroZero Robotics made the Hover Camera Passport, which is no longer available on its site. And in 2015, a company called Lily Robotics built an incredibly similar drone specifically for capturing selfies and other social-media-friendly moments, but it cost $1,000. That company has since been closed.
Despite similar efforts in the past, the Pixie has some important differences from many drones currently flying. There’s no way to manually fly Snap’s drone—instead, it flies with one of four preset flight plans to act as an aerial photographer. And while the Pixie comes with 16 gigabytes of onboard storage, there doesn’t appear to be any way to add more if needed.
That means once the Pixie is full of photos and videos (or “snaps” in company parlance), customers can’t swap memory cards and start capturing more. Instead, it’s meant to transfer that media to the smartphone, at which point the photos and videos can be edited inside the Snapchat app. However, the big limiting factor may be the battery life of the drone.
The company says the Pixie can be flown for five to eight flights on a single charge of its included battery, and naturally, Snap will sell additional battery packs for keeping the drone flying and shooting longer.
