Yuneec Breeze 4K Quadcopter drone review

Yuneec launched the Breeze 4K Quadcopter drone last year, an intelligent and rather small quadcopter.

The Yuneec Breeze 4K Quadcopter drone is lightweight and designed to fit in a backpack, though at 13 ounces, it still needs to be registered with the FAA. The plastic body feels a little more fragile than that of the GDU Byrd, which I happened to be testing at the same time. The good news is that pretty much every part you’re liable to break is for sale individually, making it easy, if perhaps costly, to get your drone back in the air should you crash or otherwise break it. Also, it comes in a little suitcase that keeps it protected from drops while you’re carrying it.

The Breeze comes with a 4K-capable camera (30fps) on board, though there are several important caveats to bear in mind. First, there is no stabilizing gimbal, so the steadiness of your video is directly proportional to your skills as a pilot. Recognizing that the newcomer won’t have those piloting skills yet, the Yuneec Breeze includes a host of preprogrammed auto-flying modes that go a long way toward improving stability and therefore video quality. There’s also some built-in digital stabilization, but, and here’s the second caveat: digital stabilization only works with 1080p video, not 4K footage. While the Breeze clearly wants to tout its 4K capabilities, they’re of limited usefulness without stabilization.

The bottom line for the Yuneec Breeze is that it flies well enough for light hobby and aerial photo use while being badly limited for any sort of serious airborne shooting of a professional sort. Its maximum flight speed of just over 10mph and maximum vertical ascent speed of a measly 2mph are both very slow but this itself doesn’t matter all that much since the Breeze can’t exceed a range of a little over 300 feet horizontally or vertically.

On the other hand, the manual flight controls that Yuneec gave the Breeze through the control app are remarkably flexible and user-friendly by the standards of a smartphone-operated drone. Furthermore, while the UAV’s selection of autonomous flight options is pretty basic, it’s more than enough for a drone that has to stay within 330 feet of its operator at all times. We should mention here that Yuneec has not included or even built a manual controller device for the Breeze. Since the focus here is on portability and compactness, this little drone can only be flown via smartphone/tablet app. Quite frankly, the app is good at what it delivers, so for the price the Breeze is selling at, our complaints are small on this front.

The overall flight experience of using the Yuneec Breeze is quite good in our view. Despite the range limitations imposed upon this little drone, it delivers some great highly localized aerial shooting and flight control experience. Furthermore, if you simply activate its automated Follow-Me, Orbit or Selfie options, the UAV will do a great job as an airborne photographer even if it’s not particularly useful as a manually flown exploration and aerial video survey drone.

In terms of drone security, we also love how well the Yuneec Breeze manages to keep itself safe during unforeseen losses of flight control. Thus, if the signal between drone and smartphone is lost, the Breeze will simply hover in place for about a minute before returning to the place it took off from and landing by itself. The hover and land mechanism also kicks in if your phone dies suddenly or if you happen to get a call whole you’re busy using the Breeze.

On the other hand, onboard obstacle avoidance is outside the price range of the Yuneec Breeze, so if you’re flying the little UAV, make sure to keep an eye on where it goes and more importantly, setting it to performs automated functions in a crowded bit of sky can easily cause the drone to hit something while it obeys its instructions. The absence of this last feature is a definite limitation if you’re thinking of having this little drone zip along behind you while you move through forested areas or urban environments with lots of vertical obstacles. In any case, thanks to the above-mentioned speed limitations of the Breeze drone, you’re definitely not going to use it to follow you as you move along quickly on a bike, skis or a snowboard.

Yuneec Breeze now sells for no more than $390 with two batteries, a carry case and a couple of rotor guards included.

 

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