Hover Passport is available Now
Would you buy a selfie drone like the Hover Passport? Is it a gotta have drone now that the Mavic Pro has some serious shipping problems?
Retailing for about 600 bucks with a promised 10 mins of flight time, this strange looking quad has only one thing in mind, that is to satisfy your narcissistic cravings of videos of yourself.
This foldable drone is designed to be as aerodynamically challenged as a masonry brick. It is ugly but it is somewhat portable enough to fit in your Guicci bag if you are as desperate as Paris Hilton for a selfie. It is however no where near the portability of the DJI Mavic Pro or has the same flying features.
For one the Hover Passport isn’t one you’d bring on long journeys. The beta testing so far has revealed that it has a 10 meter flying range thanks largely to the WIFI limitations of your smartphone app and face tracking, a feature that was the all conquering feature for the drone that looks like a dismal failure. Maybe they can update this along the way but as the USP of the drone, this to me is just epic fail.
What’s more, it cannot handle outdoor shooting. Wind speeds that are capable of blowing tissue paper off the city street would mess with the stability of the drone and even with the promise of 4K video, the quality isn’t great.
There is no streaming to your Periscope or Facebook Live feed either but that can be remedied in time with the right software but it will take a while. For one, it can’t properly pick out a human from the environment as accurately as a Malaria borne mosquito.
There are two vertical sensors that help to detect ground clearance but no front sensors to detect objects or distance. This makes the video capture choppy at best when shot outdoors but there is some hope if you want transient video of yourself running in and out of frame. Indoors, it works better but if you lived in a shack, you better think twice.
For 600 bucks, the drone is way over priced for what it cannot do.