I was very excited to bring you this post because I was recently sent the Sirui Swift M1, a new mobile gimbal soon to be released. As far as I know, I’m the first to really showcase this gimbal and it seemed very promising based on the marketing that I’ve seen. Unfortunately, getting hands on time with this device proved otherwise. Within minutes of unboxing, I ran into some issues that has entirely made me give up on this device and at this point, I have to say that I cannot recommend the Sirui Swift M1.
Let’s first talk about the design. In my opinion, the Swift M1 is just poorly designed. This gimbal utilizes a folding design to save on space when not in use. The folding design is one that a few other newer mobile gimbals have employed but if you look at those, they are much simpler. Those gimbals usually feature something like the phone mount section folding over the handle. With the M1, we have something similar but with multiple points of articulation and multiple places to fold. In practice, this makes the gimbal more difficult to fold down. Sure, once you understand how everything works and get used to the procedure, folding the gimbal becomes easier, but in my opinion, it never feels right. The gimbal is primarily made of plastic and after a few folds, I actually noticed some black dust that resulted from the plastic parts rubbing against each other. The plastic was essentially being shaved off as I locked/unlocked the gimbal. Also, with the force needed to lock/unlock some of the points, it just feels like I’m eventually going to break something.
Maybe this won’t happen and I hope that it doesn’t, but there’s another problem with the folding procedure. With the way that it’s situated, I can almost guarantee you that there will be damage to the gimbal handle purely from the folding and unfolding the gimbal. This is mainly because of the phone holder on the gimbal. It wraps around the handle and when the points are unlocked/unfolded, the phone mount hits against the handle, causing damage. Literally after my first attempt at unfolding my M1, the handle was left with some very noticeable scratches.
There is really nothing that I enjoy about the Swift M1’s folding design. It’s fiddly and just doesn’t work very well. It’s main purpose is to save space but because I dislike the folding procedure so much, I just leave the gimbal unfolded until I know that it’s going away for storage.
Different people may have different opinions on the folding design. Some may like it and think that I’m just being nitpicky and that’s fine. But there’s one thing that really ruined this gimbal for me. If you watch the video above and were paying attention, you’d notice that the OLED screen on the gimbal was on the entire time. This is not supposed to be so. It’s only supposed to be on when the gimbal is powered on and in use. My M1’s screen being on essentially tells you that it’s bricked. Although the screen is on, there’s no power to the gimbal’s motors as if it was off. The gimbal is stuck in some middle state that doesn’t allow me to do anything, not even restart it. The gimbal is essentially paperweight at the moment. This happened after updating the firmware. Like many other gimbals, you go in the app, click update firmware, it goes through the process and restarts the gimbal. Except with mine, it restarted the gimbal in the bricked state. So as of right now, my M1 is useless. The only idea that I have to try and fix it is to let the battery die and hopefully it’ll restart properly when charged back up. The main problem with this plan is, like I said, the gimbal is basically off and the only thing that’s on is the screen which draws little to no power. The gimbal has been on for days and the screen still shows a full charge so powering it down can possibly take weeks if not months, but that’s all that I can really do. I just have to wait it out.
I’m so glad that this product was sent to me for free because had I purchased it with my own money, I would be PISSED. Don’t get me wrong, aside from the folding design, this was actually a pretty good gimbal when it was working. It is feature rich and functioned like it should until the firmware update ruined everything. Because it’s a firmware issue, I have little doubts that this is something that Sirui can’t fix. Hopefully, when they see this, they’ll pull the bad firmware and update it before this happens to anyone else.
If you’re reading this and are interested in purchasing the Swift M1, I would recommend you to be careful. Realize that the folding design is finicky. It works but is definitely not the best implementation. You have to be one of those people who are ok with scratches or this is not the device for you. Also, DO NOT update the firmware unless you can get an absolute confirmation that it will not brick your gimbal. Make sure that the firmware has been fixed. Other than that, I hope the gimbal works out for you. Like I said, it functions pretty well and has a lot of cool features.
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