In October 2020 a video appeared of a guy walking into a Best Buy in the US and buying a Mavic Mini 2, before DJI had even announced it. Real or fake? I went through the footage frame by frame.
The Best Buy video
The video came from a channel called Our Beautiful World. A guy walks into a Best Buy, approaches the drone section and finds a Mini 2 on the shelf. At first it looked a bit photoshopped, but then you see it's really there. So did Best Buy get the release date wrong? That would be very bad for the store, and great for him, the first person to unbox a product that hadn't been released.
He goes home and unboxes it, and it looks legit. It seemed DJI had dropped the "Mavic" name, so it was now just the DJI Mini 2. Honestly, it looked like too much effort to be fake.
What the box said
The drone looked practically identical to the original Mavic Mini, apart from the remote, which looked like the one from the Mavic Air 2. The specs on the back of the box were where I started to doubt it:
Ultralight and foldable, under 249 grams, fine. A 31-minute flight time, I could believe. Then the interesting part: 10 km OcuSync 2.0 HD video transmission on a 249 g drone. Is that even possible? Would you push a Mini 2 ten kilometres away? I don't know if I would. But knowing it has that quality of transmission made me want to say: take my money. The box also mentioned better wind resistance, 4K video, panoramas and QuickShots.
Real or fake?
I couldn't say for sure. Nobody mentioned a price, and the flight footage at the end could have been from any drone: we see him with the controller, but not the image on his phone. But if it was real, it was going to be a great drone. (Looking back: it was real. DJI officially launched the Mini 2 a couple of weeks later, in November 2020.)