A critical view on DJI Osmo Mobile 2 Part I

There are a lot of reviews on the DJI Osmo Mobile 2 these days, a smartphone gimbal from DJI. Since i do more and more tasks with a cell phone i ordered myself such a device too.

Ordering and delivery

The are alot of blog posts and videos about this gimbal and with a price tag of 149,– € it is very affordable, especially considering the features the gimbal in combination with the app offers to the user.according to DJI website.  So far the gimbal is sold by DJI themselve and thru Apple exclusivly. Price searching machines list the gimbal but with a delivery time of 4 weeks and more.

I ordered the device on the companies website with a delivery time of 7 days. Order confirmation and delivery notice were sende by DJI Europe, but the actual delivery for one gimbal was done via DHL Express directly from China. I doubt if this makes sense in terms of sustainability.

Device and shipment

The gimbal is delivered in a plastic box, which can be used for storage or transportation purposes. Besides a USB cable for charging the battery the is no additional equipment included.

I’m not doing an unboxing video because there are enuogh arround on Youtube, but too me the material doesn’t feel cheap or of minor qualitiy. On the other hand i won’t drop the gimbal from a height of 1m to check the stability of the material 😉 The battery isn’t interchangeable but this is normal nowadays. The battery should last arround 15hrs. according to DJI but in practice there should be arround 10-12 hrs. But even this is a very good value.

There is a USB connector on the back side of the gimbal, and with this connection the gimbal can be used as a powerbank. But this should have a supporting character only, because the battery of the gimbal has a capacity of 2.600mAh, while a Galaxy 7 needs 3.000mAh and even worth the Huawei Mate Pro needs 4.000mAh.

Besides the USB connector the devices only offers a release button, a joystick and a mode button on the front. On the left hand side there is a zoom button. While a lot of other reviews say a zoom button is not necessary because digital zoom will result in a quality loss there are some cell phones arround on the market offering optical zooms.

Setup

With the setup, mainly mounting and balancing the smartphone in the gimbal you should be careful. There is a brief instruction provided by DJI and the company mainly reasons this because of longer battery lifetime with a accuratly balanced cell phones. The other reason is that you may spoil your clips if not properly balanced bacause the smartphone will not be in a perfect horizontal position and you may notice this in clips with horizontal lines visible.

Balancing is no problem with the smaller Samsung Galaxy S7, even though it might be a good idea to make the horizontal rack a little bit easier to adjust. If you balance the Galaxy S7 you might realize that mabe a small part of the gimbal is visible in your clips, so have to move the phone more to the left.

For the Huawei Mate 10 Pro the horizontal rack is too short to balance this phone properly. In addition this cell phone is top-heavy probably due to the battery inside, so you won’t be able to egta perfect balance.

While you probably would enough room to use the powerbank feature with a correctly balanced Galaxy S7 this is not possible with the  much longer Huawei Mate 10 Pro.  In addition there is another problem, there is no chance to plug in an external microphone to improve audio quality in your clips.

The App

For controlling the gimbal you have to install the DJI Go App. Searching for this app in the Google Play store will egt you to the DJI Go App 4, which doesn’t support the gimbal. You’ll need to install the older DJI Go App 3 with the official name  “For Products before P4” , which by the way support the semi-professional drones from the Inspire series. This leads us to the question, why doen’t DJI provide a smaller app just for the gimbals from the OSMO series. And of course an integration into the DJI Go App 4 would make a lot more sense, because there should be more people owning a drone like the Mavic Pro or Air instead of Inspire.

After starting the app and just keep in mind we’re talking about taking pictures/video clips with your cell phone you’re forced to register at DJI before you can start the app to control the gimbal. Too me this doesn’t  follow the rules of the General Data Protection Rules (GDPR).

After the device establishes a bluetooth connection the app switches to the camera function.

Screenshot

This was part I with the device and the app. In the second part we’ll take a look on the functions implemented in the app.

ciao tuxoche