Skip to main content

Squeezing into a phone case, the Selfly is a drone fit for everyday carrying

Drones are among the coolest ways to do photography, but they’re hardly convenient. Professional camera drones are hefty, not to mention expensive. Even our favorite drone for taking selfies, the DJI Spark, runs about $500. If you want a more convenient way to take pictures from the sky, AEE may have a solution: The Selfly, a smartphone case that also functions as a camera drone.

“What is the best camera to always have?” AEE Chief Marketing Officer Mike Kahn asked. “The best camera is the camera you always have with you. The camera you always have with you is your smartphone!” It’s a good point. Often, people want to take photos spontaneously and probably aren’t keen to lug a drone with them everywhere they go.

Smartphones are a popular way to take pictures, and people tend to carry them at all times anyway, but they have limitations. “If I’m out, and I’m having a picnic with friends and family, and I’m trying to get that perfect selfie with 20 of my best friends, my arm is just not long enough,” Kahn said. With the Selfly, however, users can simply pull out their phone, remove the drone from the case, pop out the propellers, and then take sweeping photos from on high.

The Selfly can also record video, and its battery life lasts up to four minutes (the case comes with two lithium-ion batteries, for a total life of eight minutes.) Picture and video quality should be good, too, as the case sports a 13-megapixel camera and records 1080p video at 60fps.

Users control the case via the Selfly’s associated smartphone app, available for both Android and iOS. The Selfly comes in a variety of form factors, with models designed to fit recent iPhones and Samsung Galaxy phones, as well as a “universal” case, built to fit any Android phone between four and six inches.

The Selfy costs $130 for the base version, but users can pay an additional $30 for a case with a built-in phone bank for extra juice. For those who need, or simply want, the picture-taking capabilities of a drone without the annoyance of having to haul one, the Selfly is a nifty gadget that likely fits into your everyday carrying bag.

Editors' Recommendations

Will Nicol
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Will Nicol is a Senior Writer at Digital Trends. He covers a variety of subjects, particularly emerging technologies, movies…
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more
AI turned Breaking Bad into an anime — and it’s terrifying
Split image of Breaking Bad anime characters.

These days, it seems like there's nothing AI programs can't do. Thanks to advancements in artificial intelligence, deepfakes have done digital "face-offs" with Hollywood celebrities in films and TV shows, VFX artists can de-age actors almost instantly, and ChatGPT has learned how to write big-budget screenplays in the blink of an eye. Pretty soon, AI will probably decide who wins at the Oscars.

Within the past year, AI has also been used to generate beautiful works of art in seconds, creating a viral new trend and causing a boon for fan artists everywhere. TikTok user @cyborgism recently broke the internet by posting a clip featuring many AI-generated pictures of Breaking Bad. The theme here is that the characters are depicted as anime characters straight out of the 1980s, and the result is concerning to say the least. Depending on your viewpoint, Breaking Bad AI (my unofficial name for it) shows how technology can either threaten the integrity of original works of art or nurture artistic expression.
What if AI created Breaking Bad as a 1980s anime?
Playing over Metro Boomin's rap remix of the famous "I am the one who knocks" monologue, the video features images of the cast that range from shockingly realistic to full-on exaggerated. The clip currently has over 65,000 likes on TikTok alone, and many other users have shared their thoughts on the art. One user wrote, "Regardless of the repercussions on the entertainment industry, I can't wait for AI to be advanced enough to animate the whole show like this."

Read more
4 simple pieces of tech that helped me run my first marathon
Garmin Forerunner 955 Solar displaying pace information.

The fitness world is littered with opportunities to buy tech aimed at enhancing your physical performance. No matter your sport of choice or personal goals, there's a deep rabbit hole you can go down. It'll cost plenty of money, but the gains can be marginal -- and can honestly just be a distraction from what you should actually be focused on. Running is certainly susceptible to this.

A few months ago, I ran my first-ever marathon. It was an incredible accomplishment I had no idea I'd ever be able to reach, and it's now going to be the first of many I run in my lifetime. And despite my deep-rooted history in tech, and the endless opportunities for being baited into gearing myself up with every last product to help me get through the marathon, I went with a rather simple approach.

Read more