Review: Hohem iSteady V3 Ultra smartphone gimbal

Hohem is possibly not a familiar name to many photographers, but the Chinese company has a solid track record of making stabilisers and gimbals for more than a decade.

The company's latest product is the iSteady V3 Ultra smartphone gimbal.

Available in Black or White, it retails for a competitive $344, and its standout mode is an AI-powered tracking system aimed at keeping your subject in the frame, alongside a plethora of other handy features: a built-in extension pole, built in tripod, a touchscreen, wireless remote, and a detachable fill light module, and more.

It all makes for a compelling product at the price point - so what's it actually like?

The build

Despite the relatively low barrier to entry, Hohem haven't cut corners on the packaging of the iSteady. It comes in a solidly made box, with the usual warranty and safety guideline pamphlets, along with a quick start guide.

The iSteady is built from a sleek matte plastic, and it feels solid and well built - certainly not flimsy. Straight out of the box it comes with several stickers plastered on it highlighting a number of its key features.

This is a thoughtful addition, providing clear visual cues for functions you might not notice at first glance. These stickers, alongside the quick start guide, had me up and running in about 10 minutes.

Attaching a smartphone is straightforward: place it centrally in the expandable clamp so it sits evenly, power on the iSteady, and wait for it to stabilise before connecting your phone via Bluetooth.

The clamp supports phones up to 98mm wide, 12.5mm thick, and 400g in weight, which covers virtually every smartphone on the market. The only potential limitation may be bulky smartphone cases, or the position of your chosen device's volume and on/off buttons. 

In the hand, the iSteady is compact. In fact, when folded up the device is actually shorter than my Google Pixel 8 Pro and basically the same width.

Weight-wise it's a fair bit heavier of course, but overall it could be easily stored in a pocket of your camera bag. It also charges via USB-C, so likely shares the same charger as your camera or smartphone too. 

The features

For its relatively entry-level price tag, there's a serious number of features on offer here.

Let's start at the bottom. The first sticker from points to a small integrated tripod. On one side of the iSteady is a single leg, and on the other are two legs.

Pull these out, and you have a stable base perfect for time-lapse shots or when you want to step into the frame. The legs have nice chunky plastic feet too, which make them easy to grab. Also at the bottom you’ll find a standard 1/4" -20 tripod mount.

Next, there's the extension rod built into the base of the gimbal arm. It's a bit stiff to pull out, but gives you an extra 20cm of height with no impact on the weight rating of the arm - pretty neat.

It's also an impressive piece of industrial design - it's so well hidden into the body of the device you simply wouldn't know it's there at first glance. 

There’s a small risk that the pan motor, where the extension rod extends, might loosen, as Hohem warns. Fortunately, the package includes a hex key to tighten it if needed.

Up top there’s also a detachable, adjustable fill flash. Weighing only 14 g, it can be clipped on and off for both selfies and standard shooting, with adjustable colour temperature and light intensity.

It has settings for 6,500 K (cool), 5,000 K (neutral), and 2,700 K (warm), and can deliver up to 110 lux of light—enough to illuminate your subject well.

It also has its own dedicated dial on the side of the handle too, which means you don't even have to go into the menus to turn it on and off or make adjustments to its settings.

Built into the fill flash unit is a 2MP camera that powers the iSteady’s AI tracking tool (more on that below)—a clever bit of design.

Finally, there’s a small detachable remote with a 1.22-inch full-colour touchscreen that really gives the iSteady its cool-factor.

This compact remote slots neatly into a notch in the handle and gives you full control of the iSteady’s functions. From AI mode and panning options to Bluetooth, fill flash settings, and more, everything can be managed from this tiny controller and it's screen.

It’s nicely made, feels premium and uses a live feed on its screen sourced from the fill flash camera with surprisingly high levels of detail. 

It’s also genuinely practical—set the iSteady on a table, operate it wirelessly via the remote, and you’ve got a versatile tool for filming yourself with ease.

One quirk to keep in mind is that (on my Pixel 8 at least) the record button on the remote will only work when you're already in the camera module on your smartphone. Hitting it when you're not in the camera module seemed to adjust my phone's volume, which wasn't all that useful. 

You might also be wondering about battery life with all these seemingly power-hungry attachments. In my testing, I averaged 5–6 hours on a full setup, and even longer when simply running the device on its own, and it takes about 2 and a half hours to fully charge. That’s a solid result.

AI tracking

The standout feature of the iSteady is its AI tracking module. Unlike most stabilisers that depend entirely on your phone’s camera software to manage tracking, the iSteady V3 Ultra has its own AI-powered hardware.

It's worth noting that tracking is independent of focus - the iSteady will track a moving subject, but your smartphone's autofocus will still need to do some heavy lifting as it is the device recording the content.

There's a couple of ways you can turn the AI tracking on and off. One is via a trigger switch on the front of the gimbal. A single tap of the trigger will turn the AI tracking on and off, or the other is via the remote itself. 

In use I found the tracking pretty reliable - it places a square around the subject it thinks you want to track and the gimbal will follow a moving subject pretty doggedly. It also adjusts subjects quickly - a quick tap on the touchscreen, and it will follow a new person, which makes group shots more intuitive.

That said, while Hohem says it's capable of locking onto a subject from up to seven metres away, a subject that distance will be tiny on the touchscreen and difficult to target. For best results, I'd recommend using it for closer subjects. 

One other small drawback of the AI module is that the iSteady’s camera sits slightly lower than your smartphone’s.

This means the view on the remote doesn’t perfectly match your phone’s image (the view on the touchscreen is also cropped to a 3:4 ratio) so if you rely only on the controller to frame a shot, you might inadvertently crop out a little of your subject.

It would make for a much more consistent filming process if there was a way to integrate both the feed from the AI tracker and the filming device onto the touchscreen monitor so they both matched. It’s a minor issue, but worth keeping in mind.

Stabilisation

With so many features in such a small device, it’s almost easy to forget that the iSteady is also a gimbal—and in this regard, it truly excels.

The system uses 3-axis stabilisation (pan, tilt, and roll) and uses Hohem's latest iSteady 9.0 software.

The iSteady offers five working modes: Pan Follow (PF), Pan and Tilt Follow (PTF), Point of View (POV), All Lock (LOCK), and Sport Mode, all accessible via the remote, and covering most filming possibilities. 

In testing, shots that would normally be bouncy come out smooth, and creating gliding pans and tilts is easy. The gimbal head itself is quiet, producing no noise that would be picked up in a recording either.

The gimbal provides a roll range of -195° to +135°, a tilt range of -35° to +45°, and 360° unrestricted panning, allowing smooth tracking of subjects all around, with its only weakness low to the ground shots being a little limited by the -35° tilt range.

The wrap-up

What I liked most about the iSteady V3 Ultra is it feels like a mini-production rig you can take anywhere. The wireless remote and tracking software means you can set it up to neatly record yourself, or you can film moving subjects with a flick of a switch.

I also really liked that everything you need is included - in an era where it seems every accessory must be purchased separately, it's refreshing to be able to enjoy the full benefits of the gimbal right out of the box.

Combine this with a competitive price and some pretty nifty AI features, and this is a real winner of a product. We recommend it highly.