Insta360’s tiny Go family has quietly forced bigger action-camera makers to rethink pocketable POV filming. The new Go Ultra keeps that stubbornly small spirit but pushes the line in three practical ways: a different shape, a much bigger sensor and battery, and — finally — removable storage. The result feels like a deliberate attempt to move the Go out of novelty-toy territory and closer to a proper everyday action camera for people who actually want to make longer, higher-quality videos.

Gone is the pill. Insta360 swapped the Go’s long, rounded pill body for a compact rounded-square puck with the lens tucked toward one corner. It’s a small change on paper, but it matters: the offset lens and squarer footprint let Insta360 fit a larger sensor and a larger battery into roughly the same pocketable footprint, while still making the camera simple to wear or magnet-mount. The trade-off is usability — it’s now a little harder at a glance to tell whether you’re holding the camera in landscape or portrait, the way the pill shape used to make obvious.

Under the glass is a 1/1.28-inch sensor — a notable step up from prior Go models and the same sensor size Insta360 uses in some of its higher-end action cams. That gives the Go Ultra an edge where the old pocket cams struggled: low light and dynamic range. Video tops out at 4K, now at 60 frames per second (double the previous model’s top frame rate), with an Active HDR option at 4K/30 and 1080p slo-mo up to 240fps. Insta360 is also leaning on on-device processing — an ambient light sensor and a new imaging pipeline — to squeeze better colors and noise performance from the smaller body. For people who actually use their action cam at dusk, in a car, or inside a crowded bar, those gains will be the most tangible.

Battery life has been the Go series’ awkward Achilles’ heel. The Ultra’s body now houses a 500mAh cell (and the accompanying Action Pod carries a far larger 1,450mAh reserve), which Insta360 says translates to up to about 70 minutes of recording on a single charge for the standalone camera, and up to roughly 200 minutes when docked in the Action Pod (benchmarks vary by resolution and frame rate). In practice, that means you can actually take the thing out for a day and not panic after a single short clip, though high-rate 4K/60 recording will still chew through juice faster. If you’re used to swapping batteries or constantly hunting for a USB-C port, this is a meaningful quality-of-life upgrade.

One of the Go Ultra’s quietest but most useful moves is ditching internal-only storage for a microSD slot that supports cards up to 2TB. That’s the kind of practical tweak that makes it far easier to use the camera for real projects: swap full cards, pop in a fresh one, or offload footage to a laptop without wrestling with transfers through a phone app. For creators who want to shoot more than a handful of clips without constantly syncing to a phone, this is big. The camera also keeps the Go line’s magnetic mounting options and remains waterproof to consumer-friendly depths, so it still does the basic action-cam jobs well.

Insta360 is charging a premium: the Go Ultra’s starting price is $449.99, with a Creator Bundle (extra mounts, mini tripod and the like) nudging the price into the $499.99 range. That’s higher than previous Go models and puts the Ultra squarely against more full-featured compact action cams; Insta360 leans on the Ultra’s tiny size and unique mounting accessories to justify the gap. If you’re prioritizing absolute image quality per dollar, there are cheaper alternatives — but if you want a camera that genuinely disappears on your person and still produces 4K/60 footage, the Go Ultra is closer to a sweet spot than its predecessors were.

Insta360 GO Ultra

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$450 at Insta360

Specs aside, two practical realities will determine whether the Go Ultra lands: (1) how good the image processing and stabilization are when you actually move around, and (2) whether the Action Pod’s screen and extra battery make the system more usable without turning it into a bulkier rig. Early impressions and hands-on reviews praise the sharper images and flexibility of the modular setup, but they also caution that the Action Pod adds weight and that battery life still depends heavily on how you shoot. If Insta360 can make the app editing, magnetic mounts and battery behavior feel seamless, the Go Ultra could be the first tiny camera from this family that most people would reach for instead of a phone.

Insta360 hasn’t reinvented the action camera with the Go Ultra, but it has fixed a handful of things that held the series back. Bigger sensor, swappable storage, and a more useful battery are small changes that add up to a product that’s now genuinely usable for longer shoots and more serious creators — without sacrificing the oddball convenience that made the Go popular in the first place. For anyone who wants POV footage that doesn’t require a shoulder rig or a phone mount, the Go Ultra is worth a look; whether it’s worth the extra cash depends on how much you value size and convenience over the raw specs of a slightly larger action cam.