Using your action cameras throughout the day can be challenging. You can kill the battery fairly quickly, depending on how much you are shooting, and for continuous recording, you may want to go hands-free. Insta360 has killed two birds with one stone with one of its latest accessories, the Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount, which lets you mount your camera to your body and charge it at the same time.
The Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount is, in essence, a battery that hangs around your neck and connects to a mounting system to hold your camera of choice. It’s capable of holding most any Insta360 camera, including the Ace Pro 2, X5, GO Ultra and most previous models in these series.
How you connect your camera to the Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount isn’t limited to the provided mount, though. You can remove the mount completely, allowing you to use something like the Insta360 X5 POV Chest Mount, but it feels like it somewhat defeats the purpose, unless you only want to wear the Neck Mount to charge the camera and then set it aside as you keep shooting.
The Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount was a bit tricky, as, frankly, I have a big neck. You see, in their promotional photos, people with cameras mounted in the upright position, loving life, mostly in boats for some reason. But when I mounted my Insta360 Ace Pro 2 in the same configuration, it pressed into my chin and was not at all comfortable.
This isn’t to say that the Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount is a non-starter. You can rotate the entire mount to place your camera upside down, pointed more towards your sternum, and then it’s just a matter of flipping the footage in post, which isn’t the end of the world. I tried to mount my camera to get a shot of myself while moving around as well, as some might want for vlog footage, but it was way too close to my face to get anything that I would consider usable footage, plus the downward angle would be less than flattering.
The Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount comes with a 4800mAh battery, which they claim can provide up to 7 hours of continuous recording on an Ace Pro 2. I didn’t put the Power Neck Mount to quite that much of a test, but I left the camera recording for about 40 minutes while plugged in, and the Ace Pro 2 was still at 100%, so you are definitely getting a lot of life out of that mount for sure.
“What the Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount gives you that simply having spare batteries in tow can’t give you is continuous shooting.”
What the Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount gives you that simply having spare batteries in tow can’t give you is continuous shooting. The biggest fear is, indeed, missing out (hence, FOMO), and the idea of missing a key moment or having to break up your footage makes a solution like this a good one. If you are just capturing little shots, particularly ones that you are in control of, then the spare batteries may be a better overall option for you.
It’s really what the Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount takes from you that left me disappointed. The accessory has no water or dust resistance, so for a lot of the places that these cameras are designed to go, the Neck Mount can’t accompany them due to the risk of damage. Added to that, if you were to actually charge the cameras in those areas, you would be exposing them to damage if the rubber-sealed door were opened and the charging port exposed.
For $79.99 USD, you are getting a powerful charging device in the Insta360 FOMO Power Neck Mount, but you are limiting your camera’s capabilities in terms of what you can shoot and where you can shoot it. There are scenarios where this is a great solution, such as a POV walk through a theme park that you don’t want broken down into clips. The concerns about water and dust damage, even in the presence of rain, which Insta360 warns against, make it hard to recommend the FOMO Power Neck Mount over a flexible, unpowered mount.
