Hover Air X1: the flying selfie camera

This mini drone’s dimensions and weight remind me of a toy. Tipping the scales at 125 grammes, it’s lighter than a smartphone. It fits inside a trouser pocket and doesn’t need a remote control.

Using it is also child’s play. You can have it unfolded and ready for use in half a second. As soon as you switch it on, it’s ready to rock. Pressing the power button again makes the drone take off right from your hand. If you stretch out your hand in front of it, the X1 will come back and land on you.

This is like heaven compared to the usual procedure for launching a drone. There are a whole bunch of steps you can skip:

• Folding out the legs
• Taking off the gimbal protector
• Finding a take-off and landing site
• Screwing on the remote control handles
• Slotting a smartphone into the remote control
• Pairing the remote control with the drone
• Waiting for the GPS to connect

However, the X1 isn’t a toy. That much is obvious from looking at the price. It’s currently more expensive than the cheapest DJI drone, the DJI Mini 2 SE. Fortunately, it’s not just the price tag that distinguishes the product from a toy. The drone’s features are also pretty impressive.

Automatic flight modes

The drone’s controlled via your smartphone. Most of the time, however, that’s not even necessary. It flies autonomously, following a predefined program. In Follow mode, for example, the Hover Air X1 flies after you at a predefined distance and altitude. As it’s doing so, it captures aerial footage.

The most straightforward program is Hover mode. This involves the drone holding its position in mid-air. If you walk around it, it rotates so that it’s always filming you. It also does this in the other modes. In Follow mode, it flies behind you, while in Dolly Track mode, it rushes ahead of you before flying backwards to film you. The drone can also circle around you or fly away and then back towards you. Whatever mode you use, the drone begins by recognising you as a subject to be captured, then aligns its movements accordingly. It’s a selfie drone.

On occasion, you can fly the drone without a smartphone too. You can choose a flight mode on the drone itself, which makes everything a little quicker and easier. However, there are numerous situations when you do need the app, such as adjusting settings, installing firmware updates or activating particular flight modes.

Smart control and manual flight mode

You can switch between six modes on the drone itself, and even more via the app. The sixth mode on the drone, Manual mode, is modifiable. You can define what it does in the app. For instance, you could get it to fly by your side. Or you could enable Smart Control, allowing you to command the drone with hand gestures. The latter makes it possible to execute several commands during one flight.

You can only activate Manual mode in the app, which makes sense given that you need something to control the drone with. The app has a virtual controller with the same controls you’d get on any other drone: up, down, forwards, backwards, rotate on its own axis and tilt the gimbal. Manual mode is the only program that doesn’t always involve taking selfie videos.

Safety and handling when airborne

The battery gives you about ten minutes of flight time. It’s typical to get thirty minutes out of other drones – even small ones. Although it doesn’t take long to recharge the battery, I’d definitely go for the combo version. Unlike the standard version, it comes with two spare batteries and a charger – and it doesn’t cost that much more.

Drone

−13%

3 / 43 / 4 on saleonly 3 of 4 remaining on sale

EUR367,97 was EUR424,71

HoverAir X1 Combo

11 min, 125 g, 12 Mpx

19

Drone

EUR429,–

HoverAir X1 Standard

11 min, 125 g, 12 Mpx

9

The drone moves slowly without getting too far away from you. In Bird’s Eye mode, it can fly at a maximum height of 15 metres. Even using manual controls, you won’t get it any higher than that. Horizontally, you can’t fly it much further away from you either. According to the specs, it’ll reach a maximum distance of 30 metres. When it’s circling you, the largest radius is 6 metres, or 9 metres in Zoom Out mode.

Flying in Manual mode, these limits make it impossible to take the classic aerial shots you’re used to seeing from other drones. If that sort of footage is what you’re after, this drone isn’t for you. It’s probably because the drone only communicates with your smartphone via Wi-Fi, and not with a proper remote control via a special transmission protocol.

In selfie-filming flight modes, it makes perfect sense for the drone to stay close by. Not only that, but it’s safer that way. When circling a large radius, for example, inexperienced users can sometimes cause a crash. Why? Because it’s not that easy to anticipate obstacles on the flight path from the ground.

The drone seems very safe to me in general. There’s a fixed propeller guard on the device. Combined with the drone’s slowness and feather-light weight, this means the chances of causing any major damage – either to the drone itself or to objects it touches – are slim to none.

The camera also automatically avoids obstacles when it’s in Follow mode. This works well, at least at a slow pace.

The Hover Air X1 doesn’t have special sensors for detecting obstacles. Obstacle detection doesn’t work when the drone’s flying sideways or backwards, so you have to move to prevent a crash. In Manual mode, the drone does what you tell it to do, even if you’ve commanded it to fly right into a tree. However, it does it so slowly that it doesn’t cause any damage.

In windy conditions, the drone’s advantageously light weight becomes a hindrance. Although the drone can hover in the air, it wobbles so much that the gimbal can’t compensate for the movements.

Photo and video quality

The X1 records videos in 2.7K, or 2704 × 1520 pixels. However, since it only does so at 30 frames per second, the picture can be jerky when, for example, the camera pans. To reach 60 frames per second, you have to reduce the resolution to Full HD (1920 × 1080 pixels).

You can certainly see in videos that the picture quality isn’t the best. The image is significantly less sharp at the edges than in the centre. It’s not noticeable on a small screen, but it’s unsuited to large screens.

When it comes to photos, the drone’s weaknesses are immediately apparent. As well as the blurry edges, there are extremely vivid chromatic aberrations. With this in mind, the lens doesn’t square up with the drone’s hefty price tag.

All the photos are in JPEG – there’s no RAW format. Many flight modes, including Follow, are video only. Seeing as they run autonomously, you can’t take any photos yourself anyway. The drone takes off, gets a bird’s eye view, snaps a photo, then flies back down. Controlling the camera yourself is only possible in Manual mode. When it’s enabled, however, you can’t get the same HDR mode available in settings such as Bird’s Eye. HDR reduces the resolution to 2592 × 1940 pixels, but compensates better for light and shadow contrasts. Videos also seem to have the HDR function as they cope relatively well with hard light.

This mediocre photo and video quality has one advantage: it doesn’t produce much data. The 25 GB of internal memory lasts a long time, allowing roughly 90 - 120 minutes of video to be recorded. Since the drone can’t stay in the air that long, there’s no issue with the memory. Plus, the fact it can be expanded via microSD doesn’t hurt either.

Recording audio

Most drones only produce videos without sound. With the Hover Air X1, however, you can also record audio using the app. When recording, the noise of the drone’s motor is completely filtered out – even if you’re standing right next to it, in a tight space, with the motor making an absolute racket.

The thing is, this filtering causes the complete audio to sound very unnatural and disjointed in parts. Unfortunately, you can’t turn off or reduce the filtering.

The drone stores its videos in its internal memory. None of these have sound. To add audio to a video, you need to download it to your smartphone, which adds the sound automatically. When I tried it out, the transfer was always consistent and fairly quick.

You don’t have to worry about using the Hover Air X1 indoors either. The high-pitched sound of the motor, however, can really get on your nerves. Even if the noise filtering feature worked perfectly, I wouldn’t want to record a conversation with the drone.