The Parrot Rolling Spider might not be one of the best drones on a budget. It’s probably not a good drone to program. But it could be one of the best indoor drone choices that you can hand over to your kids to play with or control yourself in order to practice handling professional-grade drones for pretty cheap. It is definitely a contender for the best drone in the market.
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Why We Like It – Rolling Spider
The Parrot Minidrone Rolling Spider is a neat little toy for kids for their first foray into drones. Much like the Newest Syma X20 and the Propel Star Wars drone. This mini quadcopter controls directly from your phone and sports a sleek, modern-looking design overall. And it has a number of safety modes to prevent severe damage in case of a crash.
- App-based control
- Up to 11 miles per hour
- 6-8 minutes of flight time
- Quality control could have been a lot better
Speed & Power
Unlike the Parrot Swing, the Parrot Mini Drone Rolling Spider is a fast-paced mini quadcopter. All four motors work in sync and produce a lot of speed in the high-speed mode. You can easily use it as a racing drone. But, it will never even come close to the maximum speeds the DJI Spark Remote Controlled quadcopter drone can achieve. If you’ve stepped up your game then you should check out our Ruko F11 Pro Drone review that can reach up to 43km/h. Or, read our Potensic D85 review, which has speeds of 50km/h.
Range
If you’re on iOS, you won’t have a problem controlling this thing as it uses a direct connection. But you won’t be able to connect to the drones like the Ryze Tech Tello and Ryze Tech Tello Quadcopter. On Android, you have to connect it using Bluetooth (Bluetooth 4.0), and the controls are super laggy because of that. The range is about 100 meters, but once it gets out of that, it will fly into oblivion, no matter what you do. That is mainly because it doesn’t have any safety mechanism built-in to actively prevent it from going out of range.
Now, the prior sentence might sound pretty funny on paper, but trust us, losing 50 bucks worth of your hard-earned money really won’t. That’s why, if you need more range, spend more on the Tello Quadcopter Drone instead. Moreover, compare drones like the DJI Mavic Mini 2 vs the Mavic Air 2 to see which one has more features.
Durability
The build quality of this mini quadcopter is good enough to a certain point where it won’t be severely damaged by one or two crashes. But quality control on this Parrot Minidrone Rolling Spider is an entirely different beast. It’s even worse than something like the Holy Stone HS200. More than a few numbers of users have reported their Parrot Rolling Spider not working right out of the box.
Camera Features
The Parrot Rolling Spider comes with a built-in vertical camera. As you might expect at this price, it’s pretty much useless as the vertical camera can’t even capture in HD. But, worst of all, Parrot decided to disable the camera for all users on Android with an app update. And that sacrifice didn’t come with a battery life or flight time advantage. And even if the vertical camera were good, an FPV camera would be able to take much better shots than a vertical camera. That is not good whatsoever.
Related: The RC Helicopter With Camera review will also come in handy for beginners.
Value
The value aspect of the Parrot Minidrone Rolling Spider really depends on your reason to buy it in the first place. If you’re thinking about taking cool shots using the vertical camera of this mini quadcopter, you should definitely look elsewhere. However, the Parrot Rolling Spider, with its excellent flight time, also can be an ideal gift for someone who’s just getting into drones.
Rolling Spider Wrap Up
The Parrot Minidrone Rolling Spider is an excellent budget mini quadcopter if you’re lucky enough to get a working unit. But, most buyers of the Parrot Rolling Spider haven’t been so fortunate.
