Hover Camera Passport review

Chinese drone-maker Zero Zero Robotics announced its Hover Camera Passport drone and $25 million in funding from investors including IDG, GSR Ventures, ZhenFund and ZUIG.

Being like a drone camera, it offers three modes of photography: 720P, 1080P and 4K. And the Snapdragon 801 processor allows easy recording in 4K, 13MP photo or 720P images in real time. It can recognize a human face and then track it. Hover Camera Passport also supports 360° shooting, throw-and-fly, automatic hovering etc.

And its foldable design gives it a weight that is only at 242g, lighter than iPad Mini. And its foldable size of 18 * 13cm is just a little big as a passport.

But the key to this drone’s design is the safety. The carbon fiber enclosure design protects the propellers, a design move that could have prevented injuries caused by the sharp blades of whirring propellers.

“I want it to be portable, I want it to be safe, I want it to be user friendly,” said Zero Zero Robotics CEO M.Q. Wang, a former Twitter software engineer. “Our goal is to build personal robotics for anyone.”

While the company has really tried to balance efficiency and safety, the result isn’t fully satisfying. As shown above, an adult woman can put her finger through openings in the cover, and of course kids can, too. So for all parents out there: this is not a toy for your kids to play with alone. With such a seemingly safe design, it’s actually more likely that accidents will occur.

It’s something that realistically could compete with the more inexpensive drones from the two established market players, Phantom maker DJI and Yuneec. DJI so far has received at least $105 million in two rounds of venture funding, and Yuneec in August received $60 million in funding from Intel Capital.

Zero Zero Robotics was founded in 2014 and has about 80 employees, Wang said, but the company managed to remain largely unheard of until now.

The Hover Camera Passport is priced at $599. To step back for a second, consumers can buy a Parrot drone or DJI’s Phantom 3S starting. From $499. This new drone-in-a-grill has 10-minute flight, a controllable range of 20m and doesn’t support a remote control, working only through an app. So, is $599 cheap? There are a number of factors to consider.

“We wanted to make sure we solved a lot of hard engineering problems first,” Wang said.

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