Flying Antigravity’s A1 drone is unlike anything else

Spinning off from the action-camera company Insta360, Antigravity now has its debut drone on sale. With 360-degree cameras that capture 8K and offer you a truly unconstrained view of the skies, the A1 is a different drone from everything else out there. Sorry, DJI.

Instead of typical drone joysticks, you get a motion controller that lets you point and shoot like video game gesture controls, while crisp FPV goggles put you right inside the cockpit.

It’s easy to fly after takeoff, but the A1’s myriad parts are often tricky to sync together — and pulling video down to the companion app is even trickier. Going on specs alone, like speed and camera sensor size, it doesn’t stand up to cinematic drones from the likes of DJI.

Still, it’s not meant to be a cinematic drone. It’s a hybrid mix of flight experience, FPV drone and a not-miss-a-thing camera drone. It’s truly unique — and fun.

— Mat Smith

The other big stories (and deals) this morning

Ridiculed by all.

Amazon has quietly removed its terrible AI-generated English dubs for several anime shows on Prime Video, following widespread ridicule from viewers and the industry. AI dubs were recently added to Banana Fish, No Game, No Life and Vinland Saga, where they were labeled “AI beta” in the Languages section of the app.

For shows lacking an English-language dub, it was a seemingly cheap way to consume anime for Amazon. However, it quickly became clear that the dubs were really quite bad. Baaaad.

Voice actor Daman Mills called the AI-generated dub for Banana Fish a “massive insult to us as performers” in a post on X.

Continue reading.

The company continues to invest heavily in its own shipping network.

An Amazon double today. According to The Washington Post, Amazon is considering discontinuing use of the US Postal Service and building its own shipping network to rival it. The e-commerce behemoth spends more than $6 billion a year on the public mail carrier — almost 8 percent of the service’s total revenue. That’s up from just under $4 billion in 2019. That split might be due to a breakdown in negotiations between Amazon and the USPS rather than Amazon proactively pulling its business.

Amazon has invested heavily in all kinds of delivery methods, including shipping logistics, buying its own Boeing planes, launching its own electric delivery vans and slowly building a drone delivery network.

Continue reading.

December 10, just in time for the holidays.

A triple? Sorry. Amazon didn’t have a specific release date to share beyond “later this year” for its latest Scribe slates. And talk about brinkmanship! Here we are in December. The company says the devices will be available on December 10. This is the third generation of the Kindle Scribe line of E Ink writing tablets — the first time Amazon has three versions of the Scribe. At the entry level, the Scribe without a front light starts at $430, while the model with a light starts at $480. The Kindle Scribe Colorsoft will start at $630. You always have to pay more for color.

Continue reading.

A highly capable cinema camera at a reasonable price.

The Nikon ZR could be a breakthrough for content creators, largely because it incorporates technology from RED — a company now owned by Nikon. The combination of professional-grade video quality (specifically RED RAW) and autofocus comes at a fraction of the cost of dedicated cinema rigs. There are some compromises on battery life and the lack of a viewfinder, but the ZR arguably offers the best video quality for the money.

Continue reading.