News

How many times have you looked back at a vacation video and wished you’d captured just a little more? With a 360 camera, you don’t have to worry about what’s in the frame. You can choose the perfect angle later. That’s exactly why GoPro’s MAX2 has become one of the hottest cameras of the year, and now it’s an even easier recommendation thanks to a major new firmware update and a limited-time 40% discount that brings the price down to just $299.

For most drone pilots, LiDAR isn’t something they actively think about. If you’ve flown a newer DJI drone after sunset and watched it safely weave around obstacles on its way home, the technology has probably already done its job without you noticing. Now, however, that tiny sensor is finding itself in the middle of a much bigger conversation.

Chinese drone manufacturer High Great Innovation has introduced a new drone designed to make large-scale aerial light shows easier to deploy. Called the EMO Mini, the company says the new aircraft is the lightest outdoor formation drone in its class, weighing just 249 grams and combining storage, charging, and takeoff into a single transport case.

If you’ve ever filmed an incredible drone shot only to crop away half of it for Instagram Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts, you’re not alone. Traditional drone cameras capture wide landscape footage. That’s perfect for YouTube and TVs, but not so much for today’s vertical-first social platforms. Cropping a horizontal video into a 9:16 format often means sacrificing image quality or cutting out parts of your scene. The good news? If you own a relatively recent DJI drone, you may not need to crop at all.

DJI is betting that the future of enterprise drones isn’t just about capturing better aerial imagery; it’s about helping drones understand what they’re seeing in real time. The company has announced the winners of its DJI Enterprise Drone Onboard AI Challenge 2026, a global competition designed to push artificial intelligence beyond collecting data and toward making instant decisions in the field.

If you’ve been looking for an excuse to take your FPV flying skills to the next level, DJI just gave creators a pretty compelling reason. The company has launched its new #AllForPassion Challenge, inviting Avata 360 users to capture their favorite sports and adventure moments for a chance to win up to $10,000.

Drone operations beyond a pilot’s visual line of sight are becoming more common across industries, but safely sharing airspace with crewed aircraft remains one of the biggest challenges. A new partnership between uAvionix and Airwise Solutions aims to tackle that problem by giving drone operators a much clearer picture of what’s happening in the skies in real time.

The US Air Force is preparing to buy several Chinese-made DJI drones for an unusual reason: to help protect one of America’s most sensitive military installations from the very drones it has spent years warning about.

Ondas is expanding its defense drone footprint in the Midwest with the opening of a new training, testing, and flight operations facility in Springfield, Ohio.

As the race to launch electric air taxis moves beyond prototypes, EHang is betting it has found a faster way to bring its pilotless aircraft to new countries.

DJI made pocket gimbals popular. HoverAir wants to make them fly. With the official debut of HoverAir Versa, the company has combined a professional handheld camera with the autonomous flying technology behind its popular X1 series, creating a hybrid device that can capture everything from stabilized walking shots to AI-powered aerial videos.

Getting an online order delivered in under an hour already feels convenient. Having it arrive by drone in around 30 minutes might soon become routine for millions more Americans. Amazon has unveiled ambitious expansion plans for its Prime Air drone delivery service, saying it expects to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. That’s roughly six times larger than its current footprint and marks one of the biggest milestones yet in the company’s push to make drone deliveries part of everyday shopping.

The DJI Flip was already one of the easiest drones to recommend for travelers and first-time pilots. Now, a major policy change in Washington gives Americans another reason to consider picking one up while today’s deal prices are still available.

Heavy-lift drone developer Elroy Air has secured a major vote of confidence from the US Army. The California-based company announced it has been awarded a $46 million multi-year contract to further develop its autonomous hybrid-electric VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) cargo drone, with the goal of making it more capable of supporting troops in some of the military’s toughest operating environments.

Could DJI actually escape the Pentagon’s blacklist? A new court ruling suggests it’s no longer out of the question.

Buying an imported drone in the US could soon become much more expensive. The Trump administration has announced sweeping new tariffs on imported drones and drone components, with duties reaching as high as 100% for certain products. While the move is aimed at boosting domestic manufacturing and reducing US dependence on foreign suppliers, it could also have ripple effects for businesses, public safety agencies, and even recreational drone pilots.

Uber Eats users could soon have another delivery option alongside human drivers. Uber and drone delivery leader Zipline have announced a long-term partnership that aims to bring autonomous drone deliveries to millions of Americans, with an ambitious goal of reaching one million deliveries per day by the end of 2029.

DJI’s Mavic 4 Pro is one of the few consumer drones that can shoot stunning 6K HDR video, switch between three cameras mid-flight, and even rotate its camera a full 360 degrees. Now, DJI is making that flagship experience a little smoother with a fresh firmware update for the drone, DJI RC Pro 2, DJI RC 2, and the DJI Fly app.

As commercial drone operations expand beyond small pilot programs, many organizations are discovering that flying the aircraft is only part of the challenge. Managing pilots, equipment, approvals, compliance, risks, and thousands of flight records can quickly become overwhelming, especially as Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations become more common. That’s the problem Finland-based FlybyOps says it’s solving with its newly launched enterprise drone operations platform.

If your travel bag already feels overloaded with an action camera, a gimbal, spare batteries, and accessories, Insta360 thinks it has the solution. The company has unveiled its new flagship Insta360 X6, a camera designed to do the job of three devices at once. It combines an 8K 360 camera, a traditional action camera, and an AI-powered tracking camera into a single pocket-sized package, making it one of the biggest upgrades the X series has seen in years.

The DJI Mini 5 Pro isn’t a military drone. And the Air 3S certainly isn’t something most people would associate with the battlefield. Yet these, and several other popular DJI drone models, could potentially get caught in the Federal Communications Commission’s latest drone crackdown.

DJI has added another microphone to its increasingly crowded audio lineup, and this one brings a feature many creators have been asking for: built-in recording. The new DJI Mic Mini 2S comes with 32-bit float internal recording, up to 28 hours of onboard audio storage, upgraded AI noise canceling, and support for up to four transmitters. But for US customers, there is a familiar problem. DJI has not announced official availability or US pricing for the new microphone.

Canadian police and defense agencies have a new option for running one of their key situational-awareness tools without sending sensitive operational data to a foreign cloud provider.

Wildfire response can get complicated fast. There are drones in the air, crews on the ground, dispatch information coming in, and, increasingly, huge areas of smoke making it harder to see what is happening. BRINC is now trying to put at least one more piece of that puzzle in the same place.