Am I missing something, but to use the Smart Capture Feature on the Mavic Air you must first connect the drone to your phone, in my case my phone to my remote and then to the air, then go into the setting and select Smart Capture to enable it then, and only then you can control it with hour palm.

Is there no other “quick” way to do this without first connecting your drone to your device such as simply turning it on and letting it detect your hand or a switch to enable it because it kind of defeats the object of a delft drone if you first have to get your phone out to enable it, you may as well then use your phone to control it?

Or am I missing how to control it with your palm without the hassle of enabling it?

I welcome your feedback

I am very interested to the answer to this question as well. It seems that smart capture has little value if you have to connect a phone or controller to use it. Might as well just use the controller.

You are right, I find that baffling as well.
On the Spark, you simply turn it on, double press the button and it can take off from your palm letting you fly it entirely without a phone.
With the Mavic Air, the save button press (press and hold until you hear 2 beeps) goes to waste: it is the same effort but it's just to activate WiFi mode. Then you have to pull out your phone and connect, activate SmartCapture and you must take off/ land from the ground.

NOTE: to those who came here via a Google search, the Mavic Air as of Feb 3 2018 is shipping with SmartCapture deactivated.

The DJI GO 4 app didn't offer the update.
You must use DJI Assistant 2 (desktop software) to perform a firmware update. I hate the DJI desktop software with all the obscure and spammy drivers installs but had no choice.

I’m glad it just isn’t me seeing the madness of this feature. The ideal solution will be that you simply turn it on and double press the button at the back to activate smart capture feature without the remote and the when you are ready to use the remote you simply turn on the remote and it connects. Surely it can’t be that difficult technically to do this.

The latest firmware update has this log:

Added support for using SmartCapture without a remote controller and DJI GO 4. Added a group

It looks like it will work from boot up. Hopefully someone on here can confirm?

https://forum.dji.com/thread-134778-1-1.html

Thanks for that. I did see that in the release notes but it gave no mention how it works. I will check it out. Nice to see DJI acted fast on this one.

I'm just a newbie, but I would think you would want your full controller available in case something goes wrong in Smart Capture mode and you want to take control.