The third and most satisfying option for piloting the Mavic Pro is to combine the remote with your phone. But it’s a nice option to have for short-range flights when you want to carry even less gear. Using it this way definitely takes away a lot of the fine-grained control you get when piloting with a remote, and switching from RC to Wi-Fi also cuts way back on your range. Connect your mobile device to the Mavic’s Wi-Fi network and you can use the DJI Go app to pilot the drone. You toggle a little switch on the body of the drone to switch from radio control mode to Wi-Fi. In another first for a DJI drone, the Mavic can be flown without a remote at all. The screen gives you distance, altitude, and direction, and pings you with a little haptic buzz and warning message if the drone senses high winds or gets too far from your home point. Unlike DJI’s previous remotes, this one has a small LCD screen in the center, allowing you to fly the drone without DJI’s app while still getting all the basic telemetry you need to navigate safely. The Mavic’s remote is also much smaller than the competition, about the size of an iPhone 6.
It feels like moving from the desktop PC era into the age of laptops, an evolutionary shift that allows the Mavic Pro to be a casual, everyday device in a way that no drone has been before.
It’s definitely one of the most portable drones on the market right now, but it manages to deliver imagery, battery life, range, and autonomous intelligence that match up to what you get from drones more than twice its size.
The Mavic Pro, which retails for $999, changes all of that. But in the past using a small drone typically meant sacrificing camera quality, flight range, battery life, and advanced features. My kids love to play with quadcopters that fit in the palm of your hand. Hardly a week goes by without a new company claiming they have created the world’s smallest camera drone, smallest 4K drone, smallest drone with live-streaming video. There have been plenty of small drones on the market before the Mavic.
Now I was carrying a drone that was light enough I could forget it was there, slipped into the ordinary breast pocket of my Eddie Bauer vest. Normally bringing along a drone means carrying at least a backpack, and most of the time a very bulky backpack. In another, I had a drone, the new DJI Mavic Pro. I went for a long hike recently, up a steep mountain trail, excited to enjoy some crisp autumn air and beautiful fall foliage.