The elephant-in-the-room seems to be the way this was rolled out. Autel Robotics in Bothell, WA didn't acknowledge the existence of it until foreign affiliates and dealers started taking preorders. That's not a very credible way to market a product so high-end it appeals largely to governmental departments, fire/first responder agencies and enterprise users with deep pockets-- particularly since Bothell and their public-facing site is the USA-assembled, USA-warranted, and no Chinese servers are getting your data kind of operation. The preorder bit starts to resemble a crowd-sourced funding scheme prior to actually going into production with it. I wonder if there are enough wealthy obsessive fan-boy types to make that work for Autel (they're not DJI, nor Sony's Play Station division)
Second, the chipset is a strange choice for 2021. The Samsung Exynos 8895 appears to have only ever been used in the Samsung Note 8. A flagship phone in it's day, that day being 2017, and admittedly a very nice phone. Note 8 however, was designed with specs for Android 8-- and is stuck at Android 9; consequently you can get Note 8's very cheaply nowadays. If it's Autel's custom coded version Android 8 or 9, is it really open to the world? How long until Google stops doing regular security updates for Android 8/9?I understand Yuneec did something similar with their ST16 controller, but locked it down. It may solve Autel's problem for getting the Smart Controller out the door sometime in the next several months, to use a chip that no one else seems to use since 2017, but one thing this Smart Controller will not be doing is editing your 6K and 8K videos. OTOH, an M1-chipped Apple iPad Pro might be able to do that, for similar money.