ZHIYUNSmooth 5S Professional Gimbal Stabilizer for Smartphone, Handheld 3-Axis Phone Gimbal, Portable Stabilizer for Vlogging, YouTube, Tiktok, Live Video Compatible with iPhone and Android - White

I'm really enjoying this Zhiyun Smooth 5S gimbal with my Pixel 4a 5G. I'm pretty inexperienced with using my phone for video recordings, but have been observing how gimbals work from various livestreamers. The base 5S model from Zhiyun includes a built-in fill light, a small tripod attachment that can mount via a threaded camera mount to the bottom or side of the handle, and a basic charging cable. The gimbal is very sensitive to the orientation it's powered on in, which requires unlocking 2 of the axes via manually pushing them out of molded locks and unlocking the handle axis via a sliding lock tab on the back. The Zhiyun logo on the first motor housing is to point to the same side as the joystick control panel, which also makes the SMOOTH logo on the arm appear in the proper orientation. Without software installed, it can still perform basic stabilization and doesn't go into a "sleep mode", which is much better than I've seen happen to some livestreamers. Most of the buttons are hooked into the app though. I'm still learning how to use all these features because, again, I'm just an amateur playing with a new toy for vacation, but Zhiyun has done a great job of creating many types of controls so you can record videos without feeling the need to use your phone's touchscreen. I would suggest looking into the combo kit because this gimbal does have a number of pieces and might benefit from a carry case, especially, but you also might want the extra light if you do much low light recording. The single light helps, but the range is kind of limited with lenses as small as that in most phones.

This gimbal is a pain in the you know what! With all of the political stuff going on between the USA and China, it makes buying and using these types of devices very risky and not worth the hassle. I don't want to use this gimbal with my main cell phone AT ALL. You have to click through a pretty lengthy sign up process to download the app and agree to a lot of sketchy terms and conditions revolving mostly around your privacy and the permissions to access all of your information. I seriously waited like three days until I finally decided to use an old cell phone that I deleted all of the apps off of to use with the gimbal. Nothing is straight forward about setting this thing up and the instructions are microscopic. I gave up after a weekend of trying. I'll give it another try at some point, but I'm seriously disappointed with the difficulty of setting it up. People want to unbox their new toy and get right to the action. Not here!. The manual is in Mandarin and English, but it's seriously a pain to read and decipher. The terms and conditions and all of the privacy waivers is a HUGE turnoff for me. I found a tutorial on YouTube on how to set the gimbal up and how to use it. That was all I needed! This gimbal is pretty awesome and it has a ton of features to assist in your video creation. It's a powerful tool for what it is and worth every dime. You can take your content creation and videos to the next level with this gimbal. The learning curve is kind of steep so get ready!

So this was a really fun device to try out. This is my first time ever with a gimbal for reference. Typically I am very knowledgeable when it comes to electronics, tech, and building things however this was a new experience for me and there was a bit of a learning curve.The quality of this is apparent when you first pick it up. The build quality on this is spectacular. It feels very nice and solid in the hand. it’s very well balanced and it definitely seems like something a professional content creator would use. There are two charging ports on it one for the main device and then one for I believe just the built-in light. There’s an app that you need to download to get the most out of this device. This app also has some really cool templates to where it’ll take your videos and put them together in a nice viewable format. All in all I am completely blown away with this product And I definitely see spending a lot of time with it in the future. Overall I couldn’t be happier and I would absolutely recommend.

A bit fiddly to get initially setup and get the app working -- and figuring out all the buttons/options -- but after that it's fairly straightforward to use. Like that it has a little tripod at the bottom as well. Do wish it folded down a bit smaller -- I'd say this is more suited for professional vloggers -- where the insta360 version might be more consumer facing.

The media could not be loaded.  Very compact design and it works well, but there is a learning curve. The instructions take some time to go through. Creative way to show how much battery power is left in it. The weakest part is the corresponding app. All the photos and video were taken on that software and it flipped the images. Frustrating. I’m going to play with it and see how much functionality I may loose using my native camera app. I have an iPhone 13 Pro Max and with a case, it barely fits into the phone holder. If you need something like this, go for this one, just keep in mind you will need to work with it until you understand what everything does.