Remember the Lily drone? It was the drone a person could launch by throwing it in the air and then it would follow the user gallivanting around Dolores Park. It was also the company that couldn’t live up to its crowdfunding campaign and ultimately shut down last January. It’s now available. Sort of.
It’s called the Lily Next-Gen and looks much like the original with a blue and black paint scheme and a smiling face around the camera. But that’s about it. This drone is not the Lily drone originally promised. This is the Lily name slapped onto another drone.
The Lily branding rights were sold to the Mota Group for $300,000 in January. Another company, LR Acquisitions, bought the company’s patents and 70 prototypes of the un-launched Lily drone. Forbes reported at the time GoPro even bid $250,000 on the intellectual property.
Mota relaunched Lily’s original website at lily.camera and is positioning this drone as the successor to the original. This new drone has features current buyers expect: 4k video, foldable design and “follow-me” functions.
But things are still missing promised to the original drone. The Lily Next-Gen is not waterproof nor does it have a wrist mounted controller. The drone cannot be launched by tossing it in the air. This is a branding play though at this point the LIly brand is rather toxic.
The original Lily sold $34 million worth of pre-ordered Lily drones and failed to produce a viable product. No one got a drone. All the money was lost. And now Mota Group wants to sell an inferior product with the toxic name.
At $799 ($499 for early buyers) it’s priced above similar drones from DJI and Parrot making the Lily a hard sell. I don’t see why a person would buy this over a DJI Spark.
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