i think the 249g thing is total marketing BS and I believe it has more to do with changing their strategy up a little starting in 2020 with airsense (ADS-B aircraft detection that they say they'll put on every drone over 249g). if they didn't throw this thing out there, maybe they would alienate incoming new potential customers. if safety is supposedly king, here is a 249g drone that you can get your kid hooked on... then next year he'll want a $3k
mavic 3 pro.
in general i wouldn't say it is appropriate to downsize from a
mavic 2 to this drone, but you say you've had the air and it was too noisy.... i also had the air and it was too noisy. i also loved the form factor, but battery life and noise killed it for me.
the mavic mini does seem promising. it does seem quieter in the videos i've seen. i also like the cage (which puts it well over 249g).
one of the youtube videos (Kai) shows it taking off a few feet right next to some ducks and the ducks didn't even look over at it.
i believe i need one as a backup for a
mavic 2 pro for work i started doing. the still images look good. the video ... i need to actually see. even with vp9 codec, youtube's compression is way too aggressive to be able to tell how good the video quality is imo. anybody find any videos to download straight out of the mavic mini?