This is my first "real" modern drone. I've had plenty of toy ones and RC helis and planes in the past, and been around some professional drones, but no direct experience with one like this. I am so far impressed with this little drone. It has a lot of features that were found of $2000+ drones from 10 years ago, at a fraction of the cost. It's also nice that there is no FAA registration required.Setup was straightforward. The quick start instructions are clear and detailed. Just make sure you follow them exactly. The most important step to NOT skip is the calibration of the internal compass. You need to do this step before it will work. Once that is done, I highly suggest you heed the advice and move to a very open ares for your first flight. What's most important about that is so that you can get a good sense for how fast this will go, and how long it will take to stop forward momentum. Hint: it's longer than you think. If you don't get that figured out, I guarantee you will crash this into yourself or someone/thing else. Also, if you've never flown or driven a remote controlled device towards you and aren't completely comfortable with the reverse control inputs you'll need to make, then practice practice practice!I also suggest you don't fly this for the first time in any kind of wind. This drone does a decent job of stabilizing itself, but I had a few gusts that rocked it a bit and caused some altitude and position loss.The app is easy enough to use, and in fact most of the interaction for the basic functions can be done on the remote. The app will require a recent version of Android. I had a mind to use an old, small tablet and dedicate to this drone, but it's running Android 5 and the app isn't compatible. Android 11 worked OK, so I'm using an older phone for this drone. The app gives you access to more auto flight modes (more on those below), and access to review and download photos and videos. The maximum phone size the remote can hold is just over 3 inches, so make sure you've got a device that will fit, or you'll be figuring out some other way of attaching your device to the spring loaded (and padded) arm. To take photos and videos, you're also going to need an SD card (not included) of up to 128GB capacity.There is a lot of functionality that I've not yet tried, and a lot of that I won't try until I am a lot more comfortable with this drone's flight characteristics. It's got a "follow you" feature that will follow the phone it's connected to. You can also highlight an object on the phone and it will follow that object. You can initiate photo and video using hand signals for taking selfies, and you can also make it do various pre-programmed things. You can have it follow a pre-planned route with up to 16 waypoints, and it can also circle a spot in multiple ways while taking video or photos/timelapse.It's important to know that this drone does not have object avoidance, so you really need to be cautious when using these pre-programmed modes. It will literally crash right into anything that ends up in its way.The battery life isn't the greatest, but not bad for this price point I think. The advertised flight time is 30 minutes, although I flew it the first time for 15 minutes and used less than half the battery, so it probably depends on how you fly it. The remote battery lasts for 90 minutes, so 3 flight sessions. Charging the drone battery does take some time (more than 30 minutes), so I'll probably look into getting some spare batteries and chargers.So far, this is 100% worth the $200 price tag. I'm already planning on how to use this when we go canoeing, and when I go off-roading. It will be great to scout ahead.

I am definitely a beginner, but some parts of the calibration are ultra sensitive on getting correct. Especially the horizontal and vertical calibration so that the drone will actually hover in a single spot. Get this incorrect even a couple degrees on either, and it will drift in some direction when you arent giving it any input. The auto home also seems to be unpredictable. Sometimes it will go from where it is, directly home without changing elevation at all. Other times it will climb vertically to about 100 ft, go to home location and them come down. This resulting in it crashing a few times as it tried to either navigate through branches above it, or nearly hit anything and everything that is directly between it and the home location when it didn't elevate first. Trying to simply navigate my inlaws yard to learn the controls and this unpredictability on its homing when battery is low, meant that trying to navigate obstacles to learn the maneuverability was more difficult than needed. At times I also would not get response from the drone for the stick input for 1 direction randomly. I would get all but 1 direction from he left stick for example until powered the drone on/off. Then it would be fine, and randomly lose another direction on one of the stick with no seeming rhyme or reason for it.

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