Parrot was one of the first companies to make a splash in the consumer UAV space when it released its AR 2.0 drone back in 2010. Now, just a few years later, it’s back with the Bebop — a smaller, smarter, more camera-focused drone.
Priced at just $500, the Bebop promises many of the same features as drones that cost twice as much money, including GPS and streaming video.
FEATURES :
You’d never know it just from looking at it, but Bebop is a pretty feature-packed little drone.
Under the hood it boasts four brushless outrunner motors, a 1,200mAH lithium-polymer battery, an HD camera, 3-axis gimbal stabilization, GNSS location tracking (GPS and GLONASS), and a boatload of other sensors. Flight time is pegged at around 11 minutes, and it ships with two batteries, giving you about 22 minutes of airtime total.
It’s got brains too. Dig deeper and you’ll find Parrot’s P7 dual-core CPU, a quad core GPU, and 8GB of internal flash memory. All this, and the whole thing doesn’t weigh more than 400 grams. Apparently big things do come in small packages.
The drone comes ready-to-fly right out of the box, and all piloting is done from the user’s smartphone or tablet, through Parrot’s accompanying FreeFlight3 application (available for iOS, Android and Windows).
BUILD QUALITY AND DURABILITY :
If there’s one thing we learned from this drone, it’s that build quality and durability don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand. Let me explain.
The Parrot Bebop doesn’t feel sturdy. Many of the parts are made from cheap ABS plastic, and much of the camera housing is made from Styrofoam. The battery pack gets strapped onto the drone with a slim Velcro strap. The whole thing looks and feels undeniably flimsy — but I’ll be damned if it isn’t a durable little quad.
BATTERY LIFE AND CHARGE TIME :
The first thing we did when we took the Bebop out of the box was charge the battery. It was completely dead, and took exactly one hour to charge. This time remained constant throughout our testing, give or take a minute or two.
For that charge time, you’ll get about 10 or 11 minutes of flight time. In our first test we made it hover in place until it could no longer stay up, and it lasted about 11 minutes, so Parrot isn’t lying about battery life. While flying at higher speeds, however, it dips to 9 or 10 minutes. Luckily, the accompanying Free Flight 3 app displays the battery life in real time, and the drone will fly back and automatically land when it gets critically low.
Those times aren’t great compared with the 20 minutes of a drone like DJI’s Phantom 2, but the good news here is that Bebop comes with an extra battery pack, and extras only cost about $30. That’s pretty cheap compared to other drone batteries, so you don’t have to break the bank to get extra fly time.
FLIGHT PERFORMANCE, CONTROL, AND AUTONOMY :
If you’re looking for a drone that’s easy to fly, look no further. The Bebop definitely isn’t as dynamic or precise as, say, the DJI Phantom 2, but the controls are pretty straightforward and easy to pick up.
You definitely don’t need previous flying experience to pilot this drone. Takeoff and landing can be performed with a single button press, and steering the drone around is as easy as tilting your phone or tablet in the desired direction. Pitch and roll are mapped directly to your device’s internal accelerometers, making forward, backward, or side to side movement extremely intuitive.
Unfortunately, yaw and acceleration (propeller speed) aren’t quite as easy to control. You control these with a virtual joystick on your touchscreen, so ascent, descent and rotation controls feel very mushy and imprecise. It’s a lot like playing a FPS game on a smartphone — it’s doable, but oftentimes a little bit frustrating, and definitely not as gratifying as playing with a dedicated controller.
The Price Of The Parrot bebop drone 2 : $500
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