Here are a few interesting things related to sports technology that have flooded my desk over the past few days.
Amazfit New Products and Benefits Call:
As I’ve said many times, I love to read about lead calling scripts. Officially, I do. There’s always a lot of good stuff there, especially when commentators ask questions (even dumb questions often yield interesting information). In any case, Zepp (the official name of Amazfit) had an investor call on Monday, and there were a few issues worth noting. Because this is a tech tidbits post, I won’t go too deep into this, everything that the company’s CEO, Leon Deng, said.
– Amazfit Helio Band their most popular product. It’s easy to see why, it usually speaks very well for the price. Leon Deng said on the phone, “Helio Strap has done a great job and launched in 2025. It’s one of the most popular, if not the most popular, products in our portfolio.”
– New Amazfit Helio Band 2 comes in the second half of the year (eg, July-December). He did not say more than that, except that, “On the other hand, we are working on the next generation of those as we look forward to the second half of this year.” The discussion was in response to Amazfit noting that they actually could not do enough with the Helio bands in 2025, from a production point of view.
– More T-Rex products coming in 2026: Given that Amazfit announced the T-Rex Ultra 2 a few weeks ago, and the T-Rex 3 Pro last September 2025 (and the T-Rex 3 in January 2025), I would assume that this would be the T-Rex 4 and T-Rex 4 Pro. I wonder at some point when they will flip the script, and make the ‘Pro’ first, then the Non-Pro (to drive higher value sales, and usually a higher line model).
– Income increases significantlystating “For the last quarter of 2025, our revenue increased to $85.2 million, up 43% year-over-year, at the high end of our guidance range. For the full year 2025, revenue is $1 million, representing 41.8% year-over-year growth.” The rapid growth at this stage is not really a surprise, as always, sustaining the growth of any small company is complicated. However, they expect growth in Q1 at 30-43% over last year.
Other than those things, there wasn’t much else there. Others discussed the rising cost of memory and the like, but none of that concerned them. Also, some talk about them continuing to expand relationships / sponsorship of paid influencers, which has long been the basis of Amazfit’s growth and marketing strategy. I hope they can find a way to do that, while some of those influencers make that relationship more transparent than it is today.
Above, a video from GoPro with footage from a new, unannounced camera using the announced GP3 chipset. I wrote a boatload about that chipset a week or two ago. Sadly, there wasn’t much of interest in the earnings call that followed a few days after (except that they were expecting strong revenue from the new cameras mentioned in the chipset).
In any case, obviously, that video looks pretty amazing on the GoPro. Knowing the GoPro well, I’ll take the swag that this is a real image from the camera (save any color corrections / tweaks / etc, as some edited video might have). That said, I don’t think this is an AI-tweaked camera off-post-production. If there’s so-called AI in the camera (like what their competitors do), well, that’s the camera. Still, it’s worth the 23-second clock.
Notably, GoPro has confirmed that the first camera with this will be in Q2 (eg, April to June). Whether that’s the GoPro Hero 14, a GoPro Cine-type camera, or another GoPro camera line is yet to be announced. That said, GoPro is on the vendor list at this year’s NAB (mid-April), the industry’s largest film/video technology conference, so that’s a good fit.
HoverAir Aqua:
Since I’m on the list of things, I thought I’d mention that I’ve started testing this drone. I bought it this past summer, and it’s finally starting to ship now, and so far it’s a combination of ‘super effing cool’ and ‘needs some usability tweaks’.
In short, the HoverAir Aqua is a completely waterproof aircraft. You can take off and stay in the water, you can throw it in the water upside down, and it will be called ‘turtle flip’ itself, and it will take off and follow you. You can (and should) wear a beacon on your shoulder, which allows it to track you better in case it loses contact for any number of reasons. Similarly, you can control the drone with the beacon. The drone, batteries, and controller are all completely waterproof (and you can wash the internal battery compartment too). Here’s a quick silly example of throwing it in the water, then letting it float around me on a windy day.
Video quality ranges from excellent to so-so, depending on the brightness. I find that it can struggle a bit with really sharp contrasts (like rocks/cliffs), but otherwise it’s a good match for something like a $300 DJI drone (eg, the DJI NEO 2). It’s not too bad for the silence from below (captured in the video above), but it can be worse in other places.
In any case, a full review is coming soon. I want to get a few more cases, but I’ve been waiting for the weather conditions to sort themselves out.
That said, for those in the US, in fact, this drone is not coming to the US. Without going down the whole rabbit hole of the current US drone fiascos, the long story short is that any FCC approval that is not done before December, does not apply to non-US companies (that is, no reasonable consumers). This not only affects DJI, but also HoverAir, Insta360/Antigravity, and more. But again, completely separate. HoverAir didn’t get that FCC approval before then, and getting on the blacklist is almost impossible at this point for the Chinese company. HoverAir refunds those who request it, or if you have a friend in Canada/etc, you can just send it there and pick it up accordingly.
DJI Avatar 360:
Finally, I thought I’d mention this one briefly. It sure looks interesting. I got the Antigravity Drone, which is also 360, although I suspect DJI will solve some of the problems the Antigravity has (ie the range is difficult, and not being able to use a normal controller is difficult).
Meanwhile, the DJI Avata 360 should start shipping on March 26. We had a bunch of premium DJI content released last week, all of which required approval of each video from DJI (and then approval of what they could and couldn’t say). So honestly, we don’t know what the gotchas are yet. To be frank, I don’t expect a ton of gotchas from this, since the basic drone technology is well established by DJI, and equally, the 360 side is well covered by their existing 360 camera (and they solved the biggie from the action camera, which was a non-interchangeable lens).
I’ll take one, or travel schedules will make that difficult at first. It remains to be seen exactly what ActiveTrack features it has (it certainly does, based on some videos). But again, there’s a lot more to come.
With that – thanks for reading!
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