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M**N
Not a true GPS Drone, poor flight performance
I have more drone experience than most - building and flying drones since 2008. I own 16 professional and consumer drones. I purchased this HASAKEE GPS Drone as a fun gift on Prime Day for a child but thought I would try it out first. I performed the required compass and gyro calibration before the flight. Note, my iPhone 12 had problems connecting to the drone/rc wifi; after 10 attempts and restarts of the drone and rc, I had to manually configure the wifi to connect. My primary concern is this is not an actual GPS drone; the HASAKEE will not maintain height or general proximity to the take-off point automatically. In fact, the drone would very slowly respond to my input (or just ignore my input) flying less than 20ft away. It is almost as if the drone would override my input and without any obstacle avoidance, it flew directly into a tree. No wind, just launched and flew itself. Not safe at all. Furthermore, the 4K camera doesn't record 4k video, that is false advertising. This is really a $50 headless drone, advertised for more than its capabilities. Batteries take three hours to charge which is fine, comes with two USB chargers. Finally, don't buy this - spend a little more and buy a drone from DJI or other reputable drone companies.
C**Y
Drone has a mind of its own
I purchased the drone during Prime day's. Was excited to try it out. I read over the instructions and watched the online video tutorial. Unlike other users I had no problem paring the remote with the drone or getting GPS signal or calibrating the compass or the Gyro and phone. For the first 3 or 4 flights it worked as expected. (I am new to flying drones so any issues was on my end) On the next flight things did not go as planned. The drone was flying about 5 feet off the ground about 100 feet in front of me when suddenly the motors revved up and the drone shot strait up into the air. It kept going up for about 10 seconds and then came crashing back down to the ground with the blades still spinning in a very low RPM. I thought maybe it had lost contact with the remote and went crazy. I then tried it again and after about 2 or 3 min of flight did it again. I thought maybe i did not calibrate something correctly. I waited a couple of days due to high winds. Changed the batteries in the controller and went thru the calibration step by step again with no rushing. The drone launched correctly and i had it hovering about 4 feet off the ground about 5 feet from me. It was steady and stable flight then suddenly the motors revved up and shot strait up in the air. it kept going up for about 10 seconds and then come crashing back down to the ground. On 7/21/22 i sent an email into customer support to ask for a solution. I will update this review once I receive an answer. I live out in the country so no issues with signal interference. I have been flying in a wide open area so have been able to recover it each time it has happened I can not recommend the purchase of this product at this time. I hope to get a solution from customer support of how I should proceed.******Update**********I received no response from customer Support so I returned the Drone back to Amazon for a refund on 7/30/22
J**L
Know what you’re buying!
The media could not be loaded. First let me say this is my first drone ever. I have long had my eye on buying a drone but for any one that is reputable you're going to spend at least upwards of $500. And I completely understand the price tag with all the things you're getting in a machine like those name brands; DJI for example. So how is this drone only $160 (at the time of this review) and why are there other drones for even less than that? I hope my review explains that question further. Again, I have no experience whatsoever with drones so I thought this would be a great pricepoint at which to jump in. Do I make a habit of burning $160 for fun? No. However, if I get some practice out of it and some horrible accident ensues and it crashes and is forever destroyed, well at least I'm only out $160 and not upwards of $500 on my first drone!The first thing to note is the small batteries take 3 hours to charge which is a buzzkill when you're so excited to take this thing out of the box and start flying! Ah, ah, ah! Have to wait 3 hours to play! Each of the two batteries are charged via included small USB-mini cables that are USB-A on the other end; not a standard pronged wall plug. I had to find a powerstrip that had some open USB slots in it to charge these what just became overnight effectively. I'll mention a comment about the batteries at this point even though I didn't think about this point until a few days of playing with the drone. This drone is not a name brand. What do I do if I want to buy more batteries? I searched for the manufacturer's name on Amazon.com and could find nothing. I searched "drone batteries" and it would take me a lifetime to sort though the list but they're all proprietary; company A's batteries won't fit into company B's drone, and so forth. Each battery will last you about 15 minutes of flight time. Even though the packaging says 20 minutes, plan on less time. In the real world the wind plays a factor, the distance at which you're flying and transmitting a 5G signal matters, and all sorts of other factors will assuredly cut the fly time in real life. If the manufacturer is reading this review, where can we buy more batteries?!Once the batteries are charged I HIGHLY recommend reading through the instructions. They're not the most clear to follow as they're most likely a computer generated Chinese-to-English translation but they get the job done. After reading the instructions scan the QR code in the instructions to download the app that goes with it. There are some very nice practical and easy to follow how-to videos in the app that are much better than the paper instructions. The app, although nicely designed and mostly simplified, isn't the greatest app in the world. There are some aspects that are a bit confusing, especially when it comes to syncing your phone with the drone's WiFi/5G signal. It will most definitely take you 4 or 5 tries to get it connected (as other reviewers have also mentioned). Once it's connected I didn't drop the signal until I flew too far away but the drone does have a feature where it stops going away from you and returns "home" when the signal is too far for the phone's pickup which is nice.The paper instructions are valuable to read to learn how to operate the physical remote if nothing else. The remote has knobs, dials, buttons, switches, and a whole host of not so intuitive things all over it. It took me about a full two-battery flight session to just feel like I'm slightly getting the hang of using the remote. Again, if you've been flying drones before maybe this is old hat to you, but for me it was completely a foreign experience and one that you have to practice at. The physical buttons on the remote that are supposed to control automatic takeoff, automatic land, and return to home did not work for me. There is an alternate method of takeoff that is described in the instructions which is what I had to use and I had to practice landing the drone manually as well. The buttons beep like they're receiving my pressed signal, but the drone never once responded to the commands.Using the iPhone app interface, I also couldn't get the point of interest (POI) feature to work very well. This is supposed to sort of put you or a point of interest that you define in the center of the shot or video and do wide looping circles around you for a cinemetographic effect. The app is most definitely not intuitive in this regard and the one time I did get it to work it wasn't very impressive. It did a very lazy slow meander around me but it was so far away that the video was sort of lame; you couldn't tell it was me the drone was circling. The "follow me" flight pattern is also not good. This drone cannot define a face or a person using the phone's app to follow, rather it follows the general location of wherever the phone is. So the phone is physically locked into the remote in my hands so I have to walk slowly away from it with a clunky remote in my hands to have it follow me. A huge note about the drone is it does NOT have obstacle avoidance in the drone; nor should it at this price point. That is crucially important to note, however, for the "follow me" flight pattern. It will follow whoever is holding the phone at whatever altitude you started the flight pattern right into a wall or tree or any other obstacle. When the drone is locked into one of these programed flight modes you have ZERO control over it without taking it completely out of the flight mode. The other modes I didn't even try as these two most common modes were not impressive I didn't even want to hastle with the others.I crashed this drone twice thus far in a handful of times of flight. Both times it wasn't me that crashed it but the drone's non-ability to handle the elements; namely a light gust of wind. Again, at this price point you're not going to find a drone that can battle high winds and remain laser focused in space. Rather, this drone is very suseptable to even the slightest breeze or wind. I was flying both times in a very controlled environment (I went to a large open spaced park near me). Both times I wasn't flying fast or crazy patterns but merely trying to practice with the controls. All of a sudden the drone just took off to left of me as if God himself flicked the drone into the tree. I tried to salvage the off course path but to no avail either time. It smashed into the tree branches and leaves and immediately came crashing straight down to the ground. The battery had been knocked loose from the drone but surprisingly all the propellers were still on all four arms! Other than that there were no other perceived damages. Then I had to go about the crazy task of reconnecting the drone to the remote control, and connecting the drone to the iPhone network, and then doing the leveling drills and the gyroscope drills to get her flight worthy again. All that said, do not think you're going to be flying this thing in your small back yard or anywhere near houses or power lines, etc. It is simply not reliable enough to just trust the drone on its own.Finally the camera. The camera actually does take some fairly decent photos but the videos are not great at all. The drone is advertised with a 4k camera but the videos are NOT in 4k, not even close! When you take a photo the drone for some reason takes a low-res photo and a hi-res photo as I found 20 photos on my phone of the only 10 photos I actually snapped. No worries, just delete the low-res ones from the phone. If you want a drone to take super cool swooping hi-res video of you on your vacation to some exotic beach, this isn't the drone for you. It does a decent job of going up in the air and snapping some okay photos and that's about it. The other flaw with my particular drone was that the camera was not fully functional. It is supposed to have a full ninety degrees of angle pointing straight out to straight down. My drone's camera couldn't do this only giving me about fourty five degrees of motion at any time. So before I took off I had to point the camera ninetey degrees straight down if I wanted to be able to angle the camera forward about twenty degrees in flight. If I wanted to take a one hundred and eighty degree straight on shot in flight, I have to return the drone to home, land the drone, force the camera by hand forward one hundred and eighty degrees outward, then take off again to get only about twenty degrees of downward angle in flight. This flaw was noticed before any crashes, by the way, in case you thought it was a result of the crashes. It was not.This drone is nowhere near what you'll most likely get in the more expensive name brand drones on the market. I think the drone is not without serious flaws that may make it difficult for first time users. On the other hand it won't break the bank for first time users should this thing crash and die on you suddenly like I thought it did twice on me. There are certainly improvements needed in the app, I wish the remote control worked like it should, and I really wish I could buy more batteries. All that said, you do get a decent drone for "only" $160.I truly hope this review was useful to you in making a decision. Cheers!
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