Review on 🐦 Blue Parrot Bebop Quadcopter Drone by Ashley Chaney

The first unit I received had the battery connector stuck in the case and was irretrievable. There's a piece of string you can use to pull it out, but if it gets caught on the connecting wire it's useless. Very badly designed. I'm sure I could free it if I disassembled the unit and I could if it weren't for the security screws. So things went back. The second block really worked for me. And it is very comfortable to fly. Image stabilization is incredibly well done despite being entirely software. But you'll quickly find that the decision to use a phone/tablet as a controller is the Achilles' heel. That's a good idea in theory; This should keep costs down, and it means one less device to carry around. First, the touch controls are really terrible with no feedback. Maybe you can teach yourself to behave properly around him, but to hell with it. Luckily, this can be fixed (at least on Android, possibly iOS too), but by buying a cheap game controller. I have iPega PG-9025 and it works great. I'm sure Parrot's own Sky Controller would work as well, but it's overpriced in my opinion. The second, more insidious consequence of not using the right controller is Wi-Fi dependency. Even under the best of conditions, the WiFi range is pretty limited. And other times. I once lost contact when he was about 20 feet from me. Brilliant. And once the connection is lost, the software takes too long to reconnect. This assumes it's possible - if you have another connectable signal nearby (like your home WiFi), your phone will likely reconnect automatically if it loses the drone's signal. In this case, your connection will never be restored unless you return from the flight app and go to your device's Wi-Fi settings. Hooray. In the meantime, your drone will remain in place if you're lucky, but might also drift off as holding the station feels so-so. And of course you can't even use it to send a distress signal to Earth because it also relies on WiFi. Definitely a lot of fun when it works, but the decision not to use a proper dedicated controller is really stupid and really cripples this drone - the default controls are useless and I wouldn't trust it to fly where a loss of connection is detrimental could be.