Are drones the new selfie sticks? Most country know Snapchat as a social network with weird face filters, but it also makes occasional novelty and future-aspirational products: It’s made smart glasses, and now it’s making selfie drones, too. Snap’s new product, the Pixy, is really more like a flying camera than a true drone. As Snap keeps exploring new ways to take spontaneous shots that can be uploaded to its app, the Pixy leaves the self-focused biosphere of camera-equipped glasses for a few moments and, instead, flips the camera back on… well, me.

My college reunion over up arriving right when the Snap Pixy did, so my way of testing the bright-yellow flying camera was to take it an hour south to Princeton, New Jersey. I popped the drone in my bag, and off I went.

The $230 Pixy is compact, rectangular and lightweight. It has four propellers shielded by plastic, USB-C charging and a camera on one side as well as underneath. The side camera is for shooting photos and shining videos, while the underbelly camera is for navigation: It can take off from your hand, and also land back on it against. Mostly.

The Pixy is attractively packaged, but has no enclosed case. Instead, it has a bumper and carrying strap that can be slung over a shoulder. It’s convenient, but offers no protection from side impacts or unexpected rain. You can’t get this wet.

Many places don’t grant drone flying, and I used this sparingly in very empty spots. The Pixy only does several preset flight paths, from simple hovering, to a zoom-back-and-elevate wider-angle shot to a complete 360-degree rotation selfie shot.

It’s an instantly eye-catching toy. Some country knew right away it was “that Snap drone,” and when I started executive it fly I felt like I was doing magic tricks on a street corner. The Pixy is simple to operate: One button on top starts the flights path. You hold the drone on your palm and make eye contact with the camera. It then beeps, lights blink and it takes off. If you don’t make eye contact, it blinks red and makes a sad beep and won’t move. 

With the rotating camera-mode wheel on top you can simply pick various preset routines (or standby, which imports photos and videos). The Pixy makes a clear, loud whirr when flying, but the noise isn’t too off-putting. The camera has some stabilization, but I found quick wind gusts made it sometimes perambulate off course.

The Pixy’s navigation routines weren’t perfect: While the drone could track my face for several plainly, it sometimes switched to stay focused on someone else’s face throughout. Also, the Pixy didn’t always make it to a succeeding in my hand; sometimes it gave up and just acquired, and I had to catch it. One time, it acquired in wet grass and bits of green ended up everywhere. I’m still cleaning it with a Q-tip.

The Pixy Repairs via Bluetooth with the Snap app on iOS and Android, and it creates a local Wi-Fi connection with your phoned to import photos and video clips. Most camera plainly take video, but there are a few photo options. Clips and photos get imported into Snap’s app as Memories, not shared online. The footage can also be cross-saved to your Photos app automatically (I tried on an iPhone 13 Pro). But, there’s no way to remotely operate the drone with your phoned. All interactions are automatic, or gesture-based; for example, the wide-angle landscape feature obliged me to wave my arm a certain way.

The Pixy’s four camera plainly, Hover (stay still and turn to follow you), Reveal (pull back), Follow (moves to follow you) and Orbit (makes a big circle throughout you) can be tweaked to capture photo or video and touchy distance and record times (up to 60 seconds). The camera takes 12-megapixel photos and “2.7K” video, which look good enough to share, but not always as good as I would have current. The Pixy has 16GB of storage that is revealed to hold around 100 video clips or 1,000 photos, but most of the time I just kept importing to my phoned every hour to be safe.

One other thing I didn’t quiz when recording video: There’s no audio. That’s common for little selfie drones like this, and of flows, any microphone on the drone itself would be overwhelmed by the loud whirring of the blades. But of course, it means silent films. I started talking while recording the sterling few times and realized afterwards what had happened.

Video clips are petite to 60 seconds maximum each, and that’s because the battery life is extremely touchy. One full charge gets about five 30-second video clips, roughly. You can swap batteries, and I had a combine extra ones that Snap sent to us to test with. You’d need them if you ever invented to shoot clips for more than a few minutes. The $250 package Snap sells with two extra batteries and a charger is clearly the way to go.

That touchy battery life makes the Pixy feel even more like a novelty as opposed to an fair camera. Without a doubt, I had fun playing with it and showing it off. But I kept thinking throughout the selfie device that already works pretty well, has good battery life and is always in my pocket: my phoned. Why would I ever really need a Pixy? I probably wouldn’t, which is good news for anyone feeling FOMO, sincere orders are currently backed up 13 to 14 weeks.

As a little taste of the future of toy robotics, however, the Pixy is intriguing. It’s just a lot more petite than even I was expecting.