Gadgetory

hey everybody its Shawn from the verge and after a year and a half of hearing about the thing we finally got to see GoPros first drone it was announced today and an event here at Squaw Valley ski resort and we learned all about what it does what it's capable of we even got to fly the thing now the big thing with Karma is that it's easy to use and that means a couple different things the first is that it's small and unlike a lot of other drones on the market it folds up GoPro is actually selling it with a backpack that it'll fit inside once you folded it all up now another part of that ease-of-use is the controller for karma it's much simpler than what you'd see with the DJI phantom4 or the unique typhoon h it's just a clamshell controller that pops open and it only has a couple buttons there's two joysticks for controlling karma there's a button for starting and stopping the motors there's a button that will bring karma back to the spot that you took it off from and it also has a big LCD touchscreen which means you don't have to use your phone to control karma at all that touchscreen will let you do things like change settings or flip through their different modes karma comes with a couple different modes like cable cam or drone E or an orbital camera mode now I've never flown a drone before so all of that sounded really exciting to me and for the most part my first flight went really smoothly I was able to take off manually I was able to pilot it around the ravine in front of me tilt the camera around all without too much trouble which was impressive because it was really windy up on top of the mountain today there were big gusts of wind and they never really seemed to shake karma out of its place whether I was moving it or whether it was just hovering and that's because there's a GPS unit in the drone itself and in the controller that keep it steady now the wind did affect the battery life which is supposed to be around 20 minutes so my flight got cut a little short and by the time that I brought the drone back to land it it sort of just hopped down on its own hit a rock and broke a propeller now this might be an easy drone to use compared to some of the other ones on the market but that doesn't mean you're going to be able to pick it up and fly it right away now the last cool thing about Karma doesn't even have to do with flying it at all you can take the three axis gimbal right off of the front of the drone and put it onto a handheld mount that comes with karma to turn your GoPro into a small little Steadicam rig it's a lot like the DJI Osmo but it's all in one package now we only had a couple minutes with the Karma drone today so it's hard to say exactly where it's going to fall into the drone market or how it's going to stack up against the competition like the Phantom 4 but when you consider the GoPro is going to sell the $7.99 Karma as a bundle with the hero 5 black for 1099 or with the hero 5 session for $9.99 both of which save you $100 it's easy to see how they're going to compete so many bees here I'm allergic and it makes me upset