Review: Parrot Rolling Spider Mini Drone & Jumping Sumo Mini Drone
You might recall that I had the opportunity to try out a couple of Parrot’s mini drones a few months back prior to them being released to the public. Now I have the chance to try them out and use them now that they’ve been released. The first of these drones is the Rolling Spider Mini Drone and the second is the Jumping Sumo Mini Drone.
Now the Rolling Spider which is a flying drone was easy to put together and set up. It comes with a pair of wheels that give it some protection from walls and the like and after you pop them on, all you have to do is pop the battery in and charge it for a couple of hours. While it was charging, I downloaded the FreeFlight 3 app to my iPhone 5s. Once charged the Rolling Spider was instantly found by app via Bluetooth 4.0 LE and I was good to go. Almost. When I connected my phone to to the drone, I found that it required a firmware update. But doing that over Bluetooth 4.0 LE is impractical as it takes about an hour to do. Fortunately you can download it from the Parrot website and plug the drone into your computer and copy it over to the drone which takes a minute or two. The FreeFlight 3 software doesn’t make flying as intuitive as it could be for novices, but it’s easy enough to learn in a day and it’s fun to use. Beyond two on-screen joysticks that can be reconfigured somewhat to user tastes, collectively enabling height, rotation, and Z-axis movement, hidden buttons can be tapped to make Rolling Spider spin 360 degrees forward, backward, left, or right in the air. The Rolling Spider has a bottom-facing 640×480 camera that can snap photos in flight to be transferred via USB to your computer. There’s no ability to livestream your flights which would be a nice feature to have. The picture quality is acceptable given that it’s a 640×480 camera. There’s one downside to Rolling Spider which is the battery life. It only lasts about 10 minutes. That seriously cuts into your fun. You can get additional batteries to extend the fun though. One big thing that it has going for it is the price. It’s $119 at the Apple Store. Thus it’s low priced choice if you want a drone that flies.
Now on to the Jumping Sumo Mini Drone. This is a ground drone that operates over WiFi using the FreeFlight 3 software. To set it up, I simply had to go into the WiFi settings of my iPhone 5s and pick out the Jumping Sumo WiFi network. Then I should be able to open FreeFlight 3 and I should be good to go. Except that I couldn’t get that to work on my iPhone 5s. Fortunately, I had a Samsung Galaxy S5 Active that I was testing and it worked perfectly with that. I’m guessing that the FreeFlight 3 app for iOS needs an update to properly support iOS 8. Operating the drone is easy and intuitive. It only took me minutes to figure out how to steer and make it jump into the air. One thing that I have to say is that it’s quick. Very quick. Fortunately it is easy to modulate the speed. One cool feature is that it has a front facing camera that allows you to livestream, snap stills, and record videos of your adventures. It’s a 640×480 resolution camera that does roughly 15FPS frame rate and that’s acceptable given the price of this drone, which I will get to in a second. One thing that caught my attention was the fact that if you touched the drone or went near it, it would make some interesting noises and the lights on the front of the drone which are clearly supposed to be eyes will flash. That will amuse young kids. The only downside to the Jumping Sumo drone is the battery life. It’s about 20 minutes. While that’s longer than the Rolling Spider, it will cut into your fun. Fortunately, you can get spare batteries. It’s $179 at the Apple Store and it’s a good choice for a ground based drone.
So, did I like these Parrot drones? Yes. These are both are good choices to get your feet wet in the world of drones. The battery life is kind of brief, but as long as you have spares handy you can have fun with these drones. Check them out if you’re in the market for a drone or two.
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