DJI the maker of the Phantom drone has answered GoPro back with a direct competitor to the Karma drone announced last week. The new DJI Mavic Pro drone is extremely portable; even more so than the Karma and has obstacle avoidance technology along with ground awareness which is missing from the GoPro completely. It also has the follow me feature in more modes than ever which makes shooting with it a breeze.
The recently announced Hasselblad True Zoom is an add on module for the Moto Z + Moto Mods™ smartphone platform which lets you add modules to your already very capable phone to increase it’s feature set. A Pico Projector, a much larger battery, a JBL speaker set and now the Hasselblad True Zoom 10x Optical zoom are the current back plate options for this new ecosystem.
What may look like a gimmick to some; it may be the advent of a personalized and very powerful experience for the future of smartphone use. What if you could add the advantages of a larger camera sensor and higher frame rates with built in processing to your phone when needed. What if you could add a built in microscope back plate to the phone for biologists on the field or a sensor module for tracking scientific concepts with the phone as a central part of experiments. The sky seems to be the limit here.
The slow motion phone that was gathering a lot of interest regarding it’s capability was the Lenovo Zuk Z2 Pro with a spec reported to be 960fps. Such a spec would leapfrog the current iPhone 6s and Google’s Nexus 6P 240fps 720p spec. However it seems such bold claims are usually met with a reality that does not match such claims.
The Youtube channel C4ETech “Subscribe Here” has had a go with the Zuk Z2 and found that the spec is pretty much smoke and mirrors. The 960fps spec which was supposed to be HD quality and full frames is nothing more than 120fps 720p interpolated by software up to 960fps. It doesn’t even allow real 240fps like other competitive phone options.
OnePlus the Chinese Startup Smartphone company has today unveiled the 3rd incarnation of their very popular OnePlus Phone in the OnePlus 3. Specs bring it in line with the competition for the most part with the Snapdragon 820 Chip, an astounding 6GB of RAM, 64GB internal storage and Dash Charge which is their version of rapid charging technology.
The 3000 mAh non removable battery will get one day’s worth of juice in 30 minutes charging with Dash or 63%. This should be an average use scenario. The Camera spec is impressive with real optical stabilizer, 16MP, Sony IMX 298 sensor and RAW image recording
The Zuk Z2 has been released and as it’s customary from many manufacturers they omit the slow motion or just mention it as an afterthought. According to the press release it does support 960fps video recording but nothing else is mentioned. There is a mention of the feature still not active in the pre release phone due to software lag which will be released at a later date.
That however has not deterred us from crunching some numbers and getting a good estimate from the Samsung 13MP ISOCELL sensor used which gives us clues as to what to expect in terms of higher frame rate support. lets dig in!
This week’s announcement of the Lenovo ZUK Z2 Pro smartphone has been plagued with misinformation and spec sheets that were not complete. We have received a full spec sheet for the phone now translated from Chinese that confirms the existence of 960fps video.
The phone will have 4k UHD video as well and a plethora of features that are completely new in smartphones like the ability to read wet fingerprints with it’s sensor and several health directed sensors like UV light, heart rate and blood oxygen which were also present in the Galaxy S6 last year. The slowmo spec is the standout feature for us!