MOTA JetJat Ultra VR Drone

  • A wee (2.5") video drone you control with your phone
  • You can watch where it’s flying on your phone, or strap it to your head for a “VR” experience (headgear not included)
  • Has an auto-takeoff and hover feature that will make you feel like a demigod
  • Not a terrible (or expensive) way to see whether you want to get into this whole video drone thang
  • On Amazon’s “Holiday Toy List” for 2017, if that means anything
  • Model: JJ-ULTRA-W (We don’t know much about JetJat, but they understand which part of their product’s name deserves the most model number real estate)
see more product specs

Device-ive

They say that smartphones have peaked. That technological improvements to mobile devices now provide only incremental improvements to customer experience. That the “Smartphone Revolution” is ending almost as soon as it began. But you can now use your phone’s highly sophisticated multi-touch display to control a tiny flying video camera that costs $29, so …

The future of smartphones lies not in technological, hardware improvement, but in how these incredible devices interface with everything else in our lives. Today it’s flying tiny drones. In the future it will be flying enormous drones.

Imagine if MOTA, the maker of this drone, wanted to create their own controller with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, a touchscreen, an accelerometer, an HD display, an operating system, and a sweet-ass bezel. The cost of this toy would shoot up faster than an FAA-prohibited drone ascent.

But when product manufacturers know that every one of their customers are carrying one of these powerful, expensive devices, they can offload that cost and focus on building their product. In fact, it’s baffling why makers of any gadget with a user interface — from drones to blenders — bother to build their own physical interfaces instead of using a mobile device’s. How cool would it be to control the speed of your Vitamix from the other room, using a slider on your Vitamix App? And how terrifying for the person in the kitchen when you fire it up?

The biggest, most glaring opportunity for replacing user interfaces with user-owned devices is in cars. Is there anything more baffling, frustrating, and borderline comical than trying to figure out how to change the time on your rental car’s clock? Auto manufacturers seem convinced that their clunky interfaces, designed (apparently) without any regard for modern UX conventions, are somehow better than providing a single, big touchscreen.

Well, almost every auto manufacturer …

And really, the “Smartphone Revolution” was never about the hardware. Location services and a touchscreen on their own can’t give you a ride to the airport — you need Lyft (or that other one). A camera on its own can’t show your friends how good you look from a slightly elevated 3/4 profile angle — you need Instagram (or that other one).

So sure, the hardware on these devices will continue to improve incrementally. But the real revolutionaries — software developers — will be the ones changing our lives ones product integration at a time.

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