Pros
- Best tracking we’ve seen on a smartphone gimbal
- Small, foldable design
- Excellent battery life
- Feature-rich companion app
Insta360’s first gimbal, the Insta360 Flow, is the best gimbal you can get for your iPhone with its foldable design, superb tracking skills and long-lasting battery life.
A mobile gimbal needs to be compact and lightweight if you’re going to take it out of the house with you and the Insta360 Flow fits the bill, measuring 79.6 x 162.1 x 36mm and weighing in at under 400g.
The gimbal arm folds out and powers on in a single twist and your phone can be mounted securely with a magnetic clamp. The magnetic clamp concept is one we’ve seen before in DJI’s OM series and the one on the Flow is strong enough to hold up to 300g in weight.
The handle is small but there’s a 215mm extending selfie stick and mini tripod/grip extender on the gimbal, along with room for a regular tripod mount thread and a cold shoe for attaching an external mic.
The physical controls are simple, with the power button, record button, mode button and thumb stick all integrated into a singular touch panel on the handle. There’s also a trigger on the back to keep the phone pointing in a single direction with options to tap multiple times to re-centre or flip your iPhone.
The rest of the controls can be found inside the Insta360 app, as can an array of shooting modes including Pano Photo, Photo, Video, Timelapse, TimeShift, Slow Motion, Dolly Zoom and Live Mode. The app also offers editing and sharing functions built-in, though you can also choose to edit in a third-party app if you prefer.
Some of the Insta360 Flow’s most impressive skills lie in its tracking and stabilisation.
The tracking is the best we’ve seen on a mobile gimbal, with Deep Track 3.0 allowing the Flow to continue to track a subject when it reappears even if it falls out of frame – something the DJI OM 6 struggled with. Stabilisation, meanwhile, is brilliant, offering smooth and stable video and a choice of four modes: Auto, Follow, Pan Follow and FPV.
Finally, there’s the battery life which can last up to 12 hours – twice as long as the DJI OM 5 and 6 – on a single charge. The gimbal can even be used to juice up your phone as your use it to record video.
If you’re looking for the ultimate iPhone gimbal, look no further.
Reviewer: Sam Kieldsen
Full Review: Insta360 Flow
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