Drones are getting cheaper but not fast enough. Drone maker DJI’s cheapest model is the US$499 Spark. So if newbie drone operators want to play around with one, it’s going hurt the wallet a bit, especially if you end up damaging the machine. That’s where the likes of this new drone from Ryze Tech could help newbies, especially the younger crowd, to get used to flying one of these machines. The Tello is a US$99 drone that comes in at just 80 grams but it features a camera that can record 360-degree video and stream live footage to a tablet or to an unspecified number of third-party virtual reality headsets. It has a 13-minute flight time and can take 5-megapixel photos.
The Tello comes with a number of nifty features you might have seen on other more expensive drones, including automatic takeoff and landing as well as hover in places more consistently or respond to hand gestures. The Tello is able to do this with the help of Intel’s vision processing chip Movidius Myriad 2 VPU and DJI’s flight stabilization tech. Having these technologies will help the younger audience Ryze Tech wants to target not think too much about flying but focusing on capturing videos or programming flight patterns with the help of simple coding tool Scratch. The Tello is expected to launch in March, whether it’ll make its way here is something we can’t say.
Source: The Verge