The Rova Selfie Drone - A Hands On Review
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zarast...elfie-drone-a-hands-on-review/2/#2b604bcb4fac
When the ROVA selfie drone was displayed at CES, I was so impressed with its wallet-friendly price point of $399 and the HD camera that it made it into my top drones to watch for 2017 list. Selfie drones are a big trend right now, and a number of companies purport to create drones that let you star in your very own action movies. The reality of the ROVA isn't as effusive, however, even with the price dropped to $299. I’ve had the chance to go hands-on with a unit for the last couple of weeks and while it has potential there are a number of glaring flaws that need to be addressed before I can recommend this to people.
I’m going to take you through my experience with the ROVA drone, pointing out both the pleasures and the problems of using it. I want to note that my experience is based on flying it with iOS, and
it’s possible the Android experience is better - though one of their Android app store reviews mentions it regularly crashes on them.
The ROVA Selfie drone design
This is where my hopes were raised. Inside a large sleek box, lies the drone, in a zippered, easy to transport case. Included are two batteries, each capable of providing eight minutes of flight time, a 16GB microSD card, a charging cable and four bumpers for the drone — so you can practice first, to make sure you don't damage it.
Rova Drone
Remember, drones may seem like toys but these are flying pieces of equipment and though the ROVA weighs in at a tiny 270g (which means it doesn't need to be FAA registered), it could still do some damage if you were to catch your hands in the blades. The zippered carry case is awesome, as one of my complaints about my DJI Phantom is how awkward it is to carry — and how enormous the backpacks for it are, meaning the ROVA — or a design like PowerVision's PowerEgg is extremely attractive.
Setup
Setup for the ROVA is simultaneously devilishly simple and ridiculously complicated. It comes with a four-page booklet that goes through some basic advice for how to charge a battery, adjust the camera lens, and what every button does. All the real flying instructions are inside the app. That’s my number one source of complaints. With batteries charged, an area cleared and my phone in my hand I open the app to have it crash. Over and over again. To be fair, when I first tried this, the ROVA had just launched, and while I thought the developers were preemptive in sending it out, I was prepared to wait a few weeks for them to update.
Round two saw my ROVA actually connect to my phone — you connect to a WiFi network called ROVA, after holding down the ROVA's power button for an indeterminate amount of time (it seems to vary for no reason). Once connected, there’s a button for taking off, that will also land the ROVA, an obstacle avoidance setting and a button to turn the flash on or off as well as switch the controls from joypad to motion controls. It also lets me adjust the quality videos and images taken, adjusting the frame rate and resolution as well as opting for 360 videos if I like — though no instructions on how to smoothly record that, something people manage to mess up even with static cameras.
Rova drone size comparison
It’s not completely clear what all the buttons of the controls do, and the app has two sections to turn to for this, ‘Flight Tips’ and ‘Help’ which would ideally be combined into one section. In fact, clicking ‘help’ takes you to a step by step guide on how to turn the ROVA on, which you’d think would fall into ‘How to' rather than a plaintive call of ‘what the hey is going on here?’
One extra weird part involved in connecting to the ROVA WiFi is that the iPhone screen reads ‘not connected’ which is addressed in the help section: Your ROVA app is connected even if it says there’s no internet connection. OK, thanks for clearing that up.
Then they say to hold the red activation button for two seconds to ready the ROVA for flight, The skimpy paper manual says three seconds. When pressing flight tips you go to a dashboard for the controls, where what every button does is helpfully highlighted. Again, it seems a misnamed section as it's not a tip on how to pose your prettiest its basic info about flying the actual drone and could be included in paper/and/or in a full manual.
Overall, this is one area where I felt the ROVA handled itself well. The video is crisp and bright and the images are clean with nice vibrant colors.
Zara Stone
Rova drone image outside
They can be a little blurry depending on how stable the drone is, but they provide a nice result. To save them to your phone, you must stay connected to the ROVA or you can download them directly from the MicroSD card. Both indoor and outdoor images came out nicely and the lens is wide enough to pick up a number of details. The video was also bright and well lit.
Major concerns
While achieving some of the aforementioned images and video, I would suddenly lose connection with the ROVA. This happened both indoors and outdoors, meaning that distance from the drone was to a cause here once the app lost connection it froze completely, meaning I had to X out and then reopen it again. When reopened the app did not reconnect and the drone continued to whizz alarmingly around the room till I gently pressed it to the ground with a pillow, so it would not hit anyone. This was very concerning, as I’d hope that an autoland would occur the moment the drone lost connection as having it roam free like this could cause injury to people/items around it.
Because of my struggles with the ROVA, I turned to see if their customer support or website could provide any help or troubleshooting --something that's not mentioned in the app or the brochure. This wasn't to be, as advice ranged from turning it on and off again to charging the batteries. Online, there’s an email address for you to send questions to, not a list of issues and solutions.I was concerned that my review might be based on a faulty model, so I got a second unit to test — this one flew, but with all the aforementioned issues intact.
This video is how ROVA say it should look.
ROVA Selfie Drone: Yay or Nay?
Overall, I see this as the little drone that should, not the drone that could, at least for now. The design and packaging is wonderful and gets top marks, but the key things here are flying, quality and safety, and while the video and image quality is great — when it works — the problems with connecting and safely flying the drone make this whole experience an unpleasant one — with danger included, if the drone should disconnect when the app crashes, making it a flying missile, indoors or out.
Zara Stone
Rova Drone on case
On the plus side, the ROVA does have a 12-month warranty so people with faulty drones or who find their drone crashes because of sudden app meltdowns will hopefully be able to get some recompense for their trouble.
Zara Stone reports on the intersection of technology and culture. You can find more of her work at www.zarastone.net. Follow her on Twitter and on Facebook.
