Review of drones that are meant for selfies

- As drone technology has taken off. I'm going to hate myself for saying that, but I'm going to stick with it here, 'cause the cat's out of the bag. As drone technology has developed one company, DJI, has really kind of come out as the market leader for consumer up through a certain range of industry drones, but we're starting to see a new class of drones appearing. And I'm talking about drones for photo and video, not just drones for recreation and racing and that kind of thing. There's a new class of drone coming out for photo and video and the kind of best term that's come up with it so far is selfie drone, which is not a name of a category that I'm crazy about.

But the reason that name has stuck is because these are small, lightweight drones that you can run on your own and that are well suited to getting footage of yourself in locations where maybe your arm isn't long enough to get the shot that you want. We're going to take a look at a particular one today. Not necessarily to call out this particular drone, but just as a way of talking about this new category, because I think it's going to take off and we're going to start seeing a lot more products like this. And I think there is a use for them.

This is the Hover drone. It's tiny and it comes in this cool, tiny little package. There's a lot to like about this drone. It's a very good design, it's small, it's extremely lightweight, and it's got this cool compact folding design. It ships with this case, with a charger, with the drone itself, and with two batteries. The batteries last about 10 minutes in normal flight, although battery life, as with any drone, varies depending on how windy it is. And one of the really nice things about this design is that the props are inside this cage.

Because of the way that you use a selfie drone, which is you want to use it close to you, you're maybe going to be using it to shoot you and your friends, there are going to be a lot of people around, perhaps you're going to use it indoors, because of that it's smart that they've enclosed the props in cages, because you're invariably going to bump it into something and this is very durable. Not only are you not going to hurt the person you're bumping into, you're not going to damage your propellers or the drone itself. One of the reasons you can use this drone inside is because it does not have a GPS. A lot of drones have GPSs in them that do a lot of the flying for you.

When you tell them to hover somewhere they are able to really hover there for you and they're able to stabilize a lot of their motion and that kind of stuff. One of the reasons this is so small and lightweight is that it lacks a GPS. Instead it tries to position itself simply through optical recognition of things. We've got some sensors in the bottom, we have a tilting camera in the front. This is actually the camera that it uses for shooting stills and video. And it does a pretty good job of staying in one place, but if you're used to flying a drone with a GPS you're maybe going to be a little bit frustrated by this.

So the idea is you just kind of hang this in the air and turn it on and it hovers there. You've got a phone interface to it that you can use a viewfinder and for setting up its various options. Now if you're thinking, wow, that's really nice that I could just, I could, here I am at a banquet table or something, I could just put this up here and get these cool shots. This thing is loud. So this is not the kind of thing that you're going to walk into a museum and shoot selfies with. I'm going to turn it on for you here, both so you can hear it and so you can just kind of see how activating it works. I set it out here, I put it where I want it, and, wait a minute, I got to turn it on first.

We got to let it boot first. You power it up by pressing and holding this button and when you do it's going to go through various initializations steps. We're going to see the camera tilt here in a minute. It turns itself into a Wi-Fi hub, so you go to your phone and you attach to this Wi-Fi network and that's how you get the viewfinder and that's how you get control. There we go, now it's ready to go. So here it is turning on. And it will for the most part just stay there making this tremendous racket.

Now the tremendous racket is worse indoors than it is outdoors, but this is still a very noisy little device. You're not going to use this in any kind of low impact scenario. One of the things that is really right about this drone is the functionality that they've built into it. They really thought through what you would want in a selfie drone. And what you want is a drone that can pilot itself. You want to be able to work this on your own, you want to be able to look natural while you're using it, and so there are some cool flight modes built into it, thanks again, to the fact that it's got all of this optical recognition stuff built into it.

So I can have the drone follow me and it is not in fact following my phone in this situation, it is following me, it is recognizing a figure. When you first put it in this mode it guesses where you are and draws a box around you, you tap on that, and then it just follows you. Now it can lose track of you. If you intersect with something that maybe makes you into a different shape it can lose track, if you move too fast you can outrun it. You've got other modes. Once it knows where you are it can orbit you, which is kind of cool. It'll just sit here and run circles around you.

It cannot do this or the following if it is closer than four meters. And that's a pretty good distance. So it wants to be far away from you, which means you're always going to be pretty small in the shot. At first I found this a little frustrating, I wanted to frame myself large in the shot, but then I realized, again, the point of this is to be able to get the kind of shots that you can't get on your own. I can get a selfie stick and get to within a certain distance of myself. This is for things beyond that.

So it's maybe not so unreasonable that it's shooting me from far away. Also, it's letting me get a lot of the environment. The follow modes, the orbit modes mean that you can conceivably catch yourself doing some action. The hover camera videos show people running and jumping off of cliffs and things like that. I didn't really have any troubling breaking it's hold on me, so I don't know, you'd want to do some tests about your particular action before you can find out if this is really going to do a good job of following you. The real problem with this thing is that is so small and lightweight that if there's any breeze at all it becomes very unstable.

Not only do you get shaky footage, not only do you sometimes get tilted footage, because it's bracing itself against the wind, that also means that the wind can bat it around and that's how it can lose track of you. I found myself, when I was trying to get it to follow me, always a little bit unnerved, because I didn't know if it was still following me. I could hide the phone behind my body if it was behind me and keep track of what it was doing that way, but I never really completely trusted that it knew what it was doing. It did a good job. Sometimes if I wasn't keep a perfectly consistent speed it would get too close, it would maybe fall back, but it did a pretty good job of following me.

But still I'm not sure that this footage is actually usable for anything. The real problem with this video is that is so shaky, it's so jittery, I really don't feel like this is usable. Now this is shooting 4K, this is a 4K video camera and 13 megapixels still camera, so you could argue that this has got a lot of latitude for being stabilized if what you're after is an HD final output or smaller. The problem is this camera also has a really bad rolling shutter, that's that jello effect that rolls through from time to time.

Hopefully that's something they could fix with software, I don't know if that's an actual hardware limitation or if that could be updatable. I have gone through a couple of firmware updates already, so there's good support for this camera so far. I took it out one day to do some still shooting and found myself frustrated by its instability in the air. I was trying to frame up fairly precise shots and the controls on the phone just aren't that great. It takes a long time to get it to pan, it's difficult to get it to tilt accurately, you certainly cannot do a smooth panning move if you want to do that with video.

But, again, this is designed to be a selfie camera, the movements you're going to do are going to be dictated probably by your own motions and having it follow you. But for still shooting I would find that by the time that I'd gotten the frame kind of where I wanted it the camera would have drifted up a couple of feet and then I'd have to carefully lower it back down and by the time I'd done that it had maybe scooted forward, which screwed up my framing. It was very frustrating trying to get an accurate frame with this thing. So I feel like this is the start of a very good product, the hardware is very impressive, they've got of things right, there are just a lot of software issues that need to be worked out.

And again, this is the beginning of this market, this is the beginning of this particular product. I think there is going to be a good use for these cameras one day. I like the idea of a small, lightweight drone that I could just keep in a day pack for times when I want to get not just a selfie, but for times when maybe I want to get a landscape shot from up a little bit higher. It would be nice to just be able to place a drone up in the air a little bit to get some still shots or to get just some simple B-roll shots. For times when I don't want to carry a larger drone this would be a great solution. So for still shooting and videography this is a technology that you definitely want to keep your eyes on.