Skeye Nano Drone with Camera Review

Quad copters were all the rage last Christmas. I’ve been wanting one, but I wasn’t willing to drop the cash on a DJI Phantom until I flew something else first. That’s why I jumped at a chance to check out the Skeye Nano Drone with Camera from TRNDlabs, which happens to be the hardest thing I have ever flown.

 

Inside the box, you get the quad, a USB cable for charging the drone, the remote, a USB adapter for reading MicroSD cards, a 2 GB MicroSD card, extra rotor blades and the remote. Although you only get one set of blades. If you break either the A or B blade twice you are done flying this drone until you can get some props. TRNDlabs doesn’t seem to have replacements listed on their website, but the design of this drone is similar to many others on the market, so you should be able to find replacement blades fairly cheap on Amazon.

 

This drone is TINY. While it isn’t the smallest drone I have seen, it is much smaller than ANY DJI drone. Therein lies it’s main problem: it’s TOO small. This drone is so small I was afraid to fly it outside. A stray wind would definitely cause this thing to go flying onto a roof or into a tree. While you still have that issue with a larger drone, at least you can more easily find it if you lose it.

It was even hard to control inside too. No matter what I did, I was unable to get this thing to hover in a spot I wanted to without it drifting up or down. I think part of this is because you can’t put the sensors in this drone like you can others. If it had more sensors and computing power on board, it may be easier to fly. Also, any random draft can cause the drone to follow along with the breeze. It’s just TOO light. Because it’s so hard to fly, I always made sure I had plenty of space when I was flying it. I used my church’s main sanctuary when I was testing it as it had high ceilings and lots of space.

 

This drone also has a camera, but I found it to be useless. It’s 640×480 and it has a really shallow depth of field on it’s lens which is exactly OPPOSITE what you want with a drone. So most of the video I shot was very blurry and useless. I know it’s only a $69.99 dollar drone on Amazon, but I thought they would at least try to get this right but alas I was very disappointed. I’m not expecting something as nice as a thousand dollar drone but I am expecting it to be in focus! The photo above and the video below are untouched with editors.  Yes it’s THAT bad.

Still, it is a fun toy and the kids at church loved retrieving it for me when I crash landed it.  🙂  All this toy has done is whet my appetite for getting a real drone.

You can get the Skeye Nano Drone with Camera direct on TRNDlabs website or on Amazon for $69.00!

MSRP: $69.00

What I Like: Cheap, somewhat easy to setup

What Needs Improvement: Too small

Source: Vendor provided sample

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About the Author

Joel McLaughlin
Joel is a consultant in the IT field and is located in Columbus, OH. While he loves Linux and tends to use it more than anything else, he will stoop to running closed source if it is the best tool for the job. His techno passions are Linux, Android, netbooks, GPS, podcasting and Amateur Radio.