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Great product for our son to learn to fly a drone. It’s very light though so is easily affected by the wind so we need to bear that in mind when we fly it.
Comes with a couple of batteries which is good – remember to charge them with the cables provided though as a regular cable doesn’t seem to work.

First of all, the Android app used to fly this drone does not work on the latest version of Android. There is an alternative app on the app store, which the app reviews say is better, but it costs £4.99 (the demo for it is free, but limited). Essentially this is an extra £5 on the price of the drone if you have an updated android phone. I don’t know if the app works on older versions of Android. There is no indication the app is going to be fixed any time soon.

As you can’t fly the drone with the app, I can’t recommend you buy it.

BUT this drone is AMAZING if you are interested in robotics and programming. You can use programming languages (including the easy to use visual programming language Scratch, but I used Python) and control the drone directly from your computer over wifi, including getting streaming video.

There are even free-to-download Python programs online which allow you to give the drone visual object recognition, making it follow people around and respond to gestures. I haven’t tried these yet but it’s very exciting to be able to have such direct control over the drone and use it as a little robot. You can program it to follow a series of commands and it’s very cool to be able to set up elaborate programs for the drone to follow and watch it flip around as it executes the program.

It’s also true that it flies very intelligently. It will stop itself if it senses it’s starting to drift and will make an effort to stay in the same place. It’s pretty reliable. However, that feature only works well in bright lighting conditions and is clearly designed to work outside in sunshine. I had to angle my big sunlamp directly at the drone to make that feature work. It wouldn’t work indoors with just the main light on and kept veering around, presumably because it got confused in the ‘low light’ conditions. (I haven’t tested it outside yet, but from playing around with it I think the light levels are the reason this feature doesn’t always work).

So if you’re interested in robots and can use programming software then go ahead and get it. But, for me, if I’d known the app was broken then I would never have bought this, because it’s dishonest to sell this with a broken app when it’s advertised as being controlled by a phone. The app is part of the package that you pay for. Really, selling a drone as being controlled by your phone and then not keeping the app up to date is the same as selling a broken drone. I don’t think this should be on sale if they aren’t going to make sure the app works. If I didn’t know how to program it then I would return it immediately because I’m not going to pay £5 on top of the purchase price. Especially when, according to reviews on the Play Store, the app isn’t even very good in the first place.

Despite that rant, and having said all that, it’s a lot of fun if you are willing to delve into t

Although the video camera is only 720P it takes better pictures than a cheap higher resolution camera.
One thing I’ve noticed is it really likes sunlight and not the energy efficient LED in my house. It doesn’t even need to be much light. You may perceive the room as well lit because the room lights are on, but adjust open a curtain a bit to make it happy. Haven’t found out which frequency it likes, but it’s not warm white LED, as that is what I have.
In the sunlight over a variable pattern it really will just hover indoors. It’s almost creepy. Don’t think the battery lasts as long as they say though. Haven’t measured it though. On sale on Chinese websites, as are battery chargers.

For some time now, I’ve wanted to own a DJI but I couldn’t really justify spending around £400 if you go for their cheaper DJI Spark. Although Tello is supposedly not actually manufactured by DJI it is “powered” by DJI so I was sure that some of that DJI technology would be included in this drone and certainly for just under £100 it made the decision much easier.
Here goes my initial impression:
It’s definitely much smaller than I expected. I dare to say, I even thought it looked….”cheap”. Somehow, I kept thinking about other cheap drones I’ve seen around that come in a cardboard box with a huge window to see the item without having to unbox it. Once it’s out of the box its different. It feels very light but sturdy. The drone is pre-built, so all you have to do is install the battery, download the Tello App on your device and you’re good to go…. unless ….well, unfortunately you have to charge the battery first.
This almost ruined my pre-excitement – I was already planning my flight route. Anyhow…charging the battery it was. To do this, you need to install the battery, get a microUSB cable you might have lying around somewhere (yes, no cable is provided) and wait for about 1 hour to an hour and a quarter. Not too bad actually. I was fearing the worst and thought it would take much longer.
OK then, 1 hour and a bit after the unboxing and with a full battery we are good to go.
The App is very easy to install and it barely takes a few minutes to install the drone. Controls are also very straight forward. There’s a short intro that I would recommend everyone to view with all the basic controls. Everything is within finger reach on your device screen (considering you’re using a phone). The default settings worked quite well. I’m not a drone specialist but I didn’t feel like I had to tamper any of the initial settings. I guess that as I get more experience using the drone I will probably discover settings I feel more comfortable with.
There is a bit of latency with the controls so just consider this when flying. The drone will not respond immediately so just be cautious at the beginning with how you fly. You’re more likely to crash until you get used to the slight response time between phone controls and drone.
The camera on the drone is forward-facing and fixed, so you’ll need to consider that when flying and taking pictures. The quality of photos is actually not bad. I think they go up to 5MP. Outdoor photos are fairly sharp and indoor photos are not as good but I guess it has something to do with the amount of ambient light. As for the video quality, it does look a bit grainy and I experienced quite a bit of frame skipping, but overall, I was quite happy with the result. It’s definitely not a drone that should be expected to take incredible pictures or videos – I guess that’s where the more expensive drones come in play. This is a fun toy drone with a decent camera and very easy to use and learn.
The battery last around 15 minutes which isn’t too bad considering that other more expensive drones will only be around the 25-minute mark. Considering it only takes around an hour to re-charge I guess it’s ok. Personally though, for £18 I will probably end up buying a second battery to enjoy a longer flight time – you’ll also need to consider the battery life on your device, so one way or the other you won’t be able to go on for ever.
Final impressions:

This drone is simply amazing, from being very stable to having the best camera for the price. As shown in the pictures, this drone is amazing for those who wanna take photos in the air at a low price, it would be nice though if you got a couple extra battery’s considering it is £100 as each battery gets me just over 8-9 minutes of battery life other than that though it’s a great drone and great fun to fly!

update: make sure to stock up on propellers as they come off pretty easily and it gets very hard to find them

Bought 2 of these cos I’m an idiot
Just waved bye to drone no 2 which flew over a fence n carried on not responding to remote altho I paired it properly and treble checked n checked
Goodbye Drone

Great product for our son to learn to fly a drone. It’s very light though so is easily affected by the wind so we need to bear that in mind when we fly it.
Comes with a couple of batteries which is good – remember to charge them with the cables provided though as a regular cable doesn’t seem to work.