Hover Camera hands-on review

The Hover Camera Passport is another of these small, portable aircraft. It has some design advantages when compared with others we’ve reviewed, including the Dobby in that its rotors are protected by a plastic cage. This prevents them from getting damaged in flight, and prevents you from inadvertent injury.

Weight and Speed

It weighs at 242 grams or 0.5 pounds. At a top speed of 8.0 m/s, or 18 mph, the Hover Camera is one of the slowest drones out there.

Control Range

Range is another consideration. The WiFi connection will drop when it gets about 60 feet away from you, and it’s just not meant to fly that high. The WiFi connection did drop once or twice on me, but this was before I even asked the company what the limit was – so it was definitely occurring when I was pushing past that 60 feet boundary. But when the connection drops the drone will just hover in place so you can walk closer and reconnect the WiFi.

Battery Life

Battery capacity is the most accurate way of determining overall battery life, and with a 1,360 mAh battery, the Hover Camera Passport uses an above-average sized battery to power its flight, compared to the average of 650 mAh. While an above average battery capacity should translate to longer flight times, it’s also important to account for the takeoff weight when estimating flight time.

Possessing a flight time of 10 minutes, the Hover Camera Passport can fly for a slightly above average amount of time compared to the average of 8 minutes.

Video Stabilisation

One issue I had was with camera stabilization. It’s obvious that the electronic stabilization the Hover Camera uses is working overtime, and without it videos would be un-watchable. It’s definitely doing its job. The problem I had was that even with the electronic stabilization working overtime, the videos often came out choppy.

Autonomous Flight

Hover Camera features a set of autonomous flight modes.Of interest to most backers will be the ‘Follow Me’ mode whereby the drone will track your movement and capture you in video automatically.Generally this feature utilises GPS but instead Hover Camera impressively features a unique visual facial and body recognition algorithm which may allow it to track a subject, in addition Hover Camera would be able to track people indoors where a GPS signal isn’t accessible.

Obstacle Avoidance

Obstacle Avoidance (OA) is always a hot topic. As Hover Camera sports only one camera, it hasn’t had obstacle avoidance.

It’s on sale now, but you may balk at the $599 price, which is a lot to ask for a personal selfie drone. You can get a very capable DJI Phantom 3 Standard $399 for less, after all. But if you love capturing your own image, and want to put an aerial spin on your selfies, the Hover Camera looks like a promising option for narcissists with deep pockets.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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