MOTA JETJAT Live-W FPV Hobby Drone with HD Camera

This is a cool little drone that's great for first timers like me who have had little to no experience flying one of these. It has a nice compact design which means it's easy to throw into a bag and take anywhere and is controlled via an app so there's nothing extra to take with you when you go.PACKAGING:The drone comes in an attractive box and is packaged pretty well - there was no visible damage to the unit. It comes with the drone, the charging cable, manual and a package with 4 extra propellers in case one breaks (which unfortunately happened to me, so these come in handy.)DESIGN:Like I said earlier, the drone is nice and compact - it was actually a lot smaller than I thought it would be which has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it's easy to carry or throw into a backpack and take with you. The main disadvantage I found is that if you lose track of your drone while flying and it crashes somewhere, it's kind of hard to spot since it's so small, but I found that I could just activate the motor to spot it in those cases.I'm partial to Black and Red so I love the color of it, although this could be a potential problem if you decide to fly it at night, Luckily, there are four lights on the bottom (2 red and 2 blue) so it should be easy enough to spot.The drone has a battery compartment which fits the included battery very snugly although I found it a bit tough to get it back into the unit after removing it to charge it as there is a fairly thick wire that connects the drone to the battery. One important thing to note is that the unit has a propriety charging cable which is standard USB A on one side and Mota's own connector on the other end which means if you lose it you won't be able to charge it anymore. Also, it took me a few minutes to figure out exactly how to connect the battery to the cable as it's a bit tough to fit the connectors together. Once I did it was easy enough, The USB end of the cable lights up to let you know if it's charging and turns off when it's done. I found in my tests that it takes around 30-40 minutes to achieve a full charge. You can plug it into a computer or USB charging hub, which is what I used. Our results my vary depending on what you plug it into.The Wi-Fi/Camera module can be taken off the unit as well although I'm not really sure what the purpose of this is other than if it was damaged and you needed to replace it.The propellers are easy to take off and on which can be handy if they become damaged during flight (which happened to me more than once.)USAGE:I was really surprised how quickly this thing took off and was high up in the air before I knew it. I didn't even have it a full speed which was amazing. In order to control it, you must first download the Mota app from the App Store and then connect to the drone via your phone's Wi-Fi. The connection was generally pretty solid and the controls on the App were easy enough to figure out, but be forewarned - there is a learning curve to flying this thing and I had quite a few accidents before I figured out what I was doing. It was also cool that I was able to see what the drone was seeing through the included camera. The camera quality is not 1080p, but for a drone at this price point I think it works just fine. The manual says that the maximum you should fly the drone before it loses connectivity is 75 feet, but I was too nervous to let it get too far away from me so I generally flew it at fairly low altitudes. I generally got about 6-8 minutes of flight time, which admittedly isn't a huge amount of time, but it was fine for my purposes. I had several fairly high speed crashes and the unit did sustain some damage, but I was always able to flight it again once I got it back on a level surface. I would recommend doing your first few flights in a large, grassy area as concrete can be tough on these things.CONCLUSION:Overall this is a great little drone for the price. I've had a bunch of fun flying it and am looking forward to doing some more testing with it in the next few days and getting some videos out of it. I've recently started to explore the world of drones and am hoping to move up to a larger Mota drone in the future. I would be interested to pilot one with an actual control pad to see how it differed from the software control. For the price, you can't do better than buying one of these :)I received this MOTA JETJAT Live-W FPV Hobby Drone with HD Camera from MOTA at a discount in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.