Skip to main content

Air Pix is a pocket-sized flying photographer robot, and it’s only $100

AirSelfie showed its latest miniature camera drone at CES 2020 this week called the Air Pix, fixing many of the problems that its first drones had — most importantly being able to fly the damn thing.

Air Pix selfie drone

Regular readers may remember our first run-in with an AirSelfie drone with our AirSelfie 2 review. It was perhaps one of the most disastrous review experiences that the author has had in 15+ years in tech news. Poor app design and testing initially locked us out of testing the drone at all, and once AirSelfie addressed that issue, the app was so bad it made our eyes hurt. It was like something you’d see on a 2009 iPhone.

Recommended Videos

Then the flying of the drone — if you can call it that. We had so many issues that we may have spent five minutes in total flying it because controlling it was that difficult.

Enter the Air Pix. While AirSelfie did attempt to right the ship last year with a set of new drones at CES 2019, this year’s new drone seems to check all the boxes for correcting what AirSelfie did wrong initially. The Air Pix includes autonomous flying capabilities, which makes keeping it in the air so much easier. The app is also much improved, and most importantly, the price is now just $99.

Meet AIR PIX by AirSelfie

But AirSelfie is also promoting two higher-end pocket drones at CES, called the Air Pix+, and the Air Duo. The newest Air Pix drone adds an adjustable gimbal to the Air Pix frame, while the Air Duo includes both dual parallel and bird’s-eye cameras. Both are expected to be available later in 2020. Pricing for those drones was not disclosed.

While the Air Pix impressed us, we were more impressed with the Air Pix+ and Air Duo. Putting a gimbal — much less two cameras — on a pocket drone is pretty impressive, and with the flying and app issues fixed, the experience with these newest drones should be much more positive.

We hope to have the new drones to test in the not-so-distant future and have high expectations for a greatly improved experience. From what we saw here at CES, that looks like it will be the case.

Follow our live blog for more CES news and announcements.

Ed Oswald
For fifteen years, Ed has written about the latest and greatest in gadgets and technology trends. At Digital Trends, he's…
Rivian set to unlock unmapped roads for Gen2 vehicles
rivian unmapped roads gen2 r1t gallery image 0

Rivian fans rejoice! Just a few weeks ago, Rivian rolled out automated, hands-off driving for its second-gen R1 vehicles with a game-changing software update. Yet, the new feature, which is only operational on mapped highways, had left many fans craving for more.
Now the company, which prides itself on listening to - and delivering on - what its customers want, didn’t wait long to signal a ‘map-free’ upgrade will be available later this year.
“One feedback we’ve heard loud and clear is that customers love [Highway Assist] but they want to use it in more places,” James Philbin, Rivian VP of autonomy, said on the podcast RivianTrackr Hangouts. “So that’s something kind of exciting we’re working on, we’re calling it internally ‘Map Free’, that we’re targeting for later this year.”
The lag between the release of Highway Assist (HWA) and Map Free automated driving gives time for the fleet of Rivian vehicles to gather ‘unique events’. These events are used to train Rivian’s offline model in the cloud before data is distilled back to individual vehicles.
As Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe explained in early March, HWA marked the very beginning of an expanding automated-driving feature set, “going from highways to surface roads, to turn-by-turn.”
For now, HWA still requires drivers to keep their eyes on the road. The system will send alerts if you drift too long without paying attention. But stay tuned—eyes-off driving is set for 2026.
It’s also part of what Rivian calls its “Giving you your time back” philosophy, the first of three pillars supporting Rivian’s vision over the next three to five years. Philbin says that philosophy is focused on “meeting drivers where they are”, as opposed to chasing full automation in the way other automakers, such as Tesla’s robotaxi, might be doing.
“We recognize a lot of people buy Rivians to go on these adventures, to have these amazing trips. They want to drive, and we want to let them drive,” Philbin says. “But there’s a lot of other driving that’s very monotonous, very boring, like on the highway. There, giving you your time back is how we can give the best experience.”
This will also eventually lead to the third pillar of Rivian’s vision, which is delivering Level 4, or high-automation vehicles: Those will offer features such as auto park or auto valet, where you can get out of your Rivian at the office, or at the airport, and it goes off and parks itself.
While not promising anything, Philbin says he believes the current Gen 2 hardware and platforms should be able to support these upcoming features.
The second pillar for Rivian is its focus on active safety features, as the EV-maker rewrote its entire autonomous vehicle (AV) system for its Gen2 models. This focus allowed Rivian’s R1T to be the only large truck in North America to get a Top Safety Pick+ from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.
“I believe there’s a lot of innovation in the active safety space, in terms of making those features more capable and preventing more accidents,” Philbin says. “Really the goal, the north star goal, would be to have Rivian be one of the safest vehicles on the road, not only for the occupants but also for other road users.”

Read more
Jaguar Land Rover, Nissan hit the brake on shipments to U.S. over tariffs
Range Rover Sport P400e

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) has announced it will pause shipments of its UK-made cars to the United States this month, while it figures out how to respond to President Donald Trump's 25% tariff on imported cars.

"As we work to address the new trading terms with our business partners, we are taking some short-term actions, including a shipment pause in April, as we develop our mid- to longer-term plans," JLR said in a statement sent to various media.

Read more
DeepSeek readies the next AI disruption with self-improving models
DeepSeek AI chatbot running on an iPhone.

Barely a few months ago, Wall Street’s big bet on generative AI had a moment of reckoning when DeepSeek arrived on the scene. Despite its heavily censored nature, the open source DeepSeek proved that a frontier reasoning AI model doesn’t necessarily require billions of dollars and can be pulled off on modest resources.

It quickly found commercial adoption by giants such as Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo, while the likes of Microsoft, Alibaba, and Tencent quickly gave it a spot on their platforms. Now, the buzzy Chinese company’s next target is self-improving AI models that use a looping judge-reward approach to improve themselves.

Read more