XS-809W

There's no fancy unboxing video, no fancy super duper product shots. I bought this little beastie because I've always been curious about camera quads, and I have to say right off the top that I'm very happy with it. If you use the link below to buy it, I even get a few points affiliate bonus. What's not to like?

So the burning question—what exactly is it, what does it do, how well does it do it, and is it fun?

It looks like a clone...

...and it is. It's a very inexpensive clone trying desperately to make you think of a Mavic Pro while costing about one tenth (or less) than the brand name device. It tries hard, from the body styling down to the foldable arms so that you can pretty much shove it in a hoodie pocket if you like.

How good is it at those things? The folding detent was pretty positive, even though I did manage to fold the arms up with some of my rough crashes and landings. But it's very tough, I think mainly because it's also incredibly light for its size so there are no large impact forces when it does go in.

The prop guards they provide would have been a good idea but I'm impatient and also prop guards tend to hook things so I prefer to leave them off. Also, the props are incredibly tough, I should have broken them a dozen times by now with my rough as guts flying style, but they only have a few scuff marks to show for all that abuse.

It has a fair battery life (10–12 minutes they say, but at low speeds I've gotten almost 15 minutes out of one charge) and the batteries take up to two hours to charge, but that's still a good amount of time to stay in the air, and it's not really that bad for the price.

It doesn't have GPS or altitude hold, so it's manual flying all the way compared to the Mavic which is a lot smarter. But her prices... (I mean, I paid $64AUD for this, and a Mavic Pro starts around $1,900AUD for the best price I've been able to find. No contest).

It's incredibly light, and to begin with I was a bit concerned it'd be fragile and/or useless in a breeze, but as it turns out it's both incredibly tough and also manages light breezes extremely well.

Trying it from the ground straight up, it was surprisingly quick to become a small dot in the sky. Flying it along at top speed was pretty exhilarating, and it has a 100m–200m range of control and video, depending on conditions. Reasonably responsive to control inputs, but just like with any aircraft you have to think ahead and start correcting early, or else crash...

It tended to drop altitude fast when going forward, a result of not having altitude hold I guess, but who wants to fly a camera drone along at race speeds anyway? It's good for moseying along taking videos and stills and has a good reserve of power for getting out of sub-optimal situations.

Is it really an FPV? Yes, in that you can get a first-person view and can even use VR goggles over a Wi-Fi connection. But Wi-Fi is laggy so I wouldn't rely on it to avoid obstacles. I fly line of sight and put the phone on the remote controller just to check camera aiming/framing and take pictures and video.

I want to be really, really clear about all of this. It's not a fully-featured videographer's platform and omits almost everything to get to the price point. But it is also great fun! And I didn't receive my XS809 as a review unit, I bought it straight up (but at a bargain price) so I have no vested interests in providing this review. It's still available at that bargain price now but I don't know for how long.

Also: Using my affiliate link ("More Info" button) doesn't alter the price of the unit like some places do, but it does give me a small offset towards the price of future orders.

How does it stack up?

There's the beauty of it—it's just been so much fun and such good value! I didn't care that it didn't have GPS or altitude hold, didn't care that the little 2MP camera wasn't better, and it didn't matter that it has a 12 minute flying time and then a two hour charge time. I've plain got lost in flying it.

I've only ever owned three nano-drones in my life, and therefore I'm a rank beginner flyer. That made me the perfect person to give the XS809W a good workout, and I reckon I managed that.

In the box, you get the drone with the battery already fitted, a charger cable for the battery, a gamepad-style remote control that needs AA batteries, four spare props and a screwdriver, four prop guards, and the tiny manual.

Flying characteristics were, to my mind, very good. Compared to the twitchy little nanos, it was much easier to come to grips with flying it without collecting trees, ground, buildings, and myself. In a breeze it drifts away and needs returning to station all the time, but unless you have a good drone with a GPS that's always going to happen. I was happy with it and was able to get it to hold station fairly well.

Reaction speed on slowest speed setting was slow but then again, that's what it's for. Tapping the speed button again goes from 30% reaction speed to 60%, a second tap gives 100%, and a third tap goes back to 30%. I'm flying in a yard with trees of all heights and spreads, a chicken run and coop, sheds, and all sorts of obstacles so 60% was about right.

Altitude hold also isn't fitted on the model I bought, but again, it became easier and easier to hold station, yaw around to aim the camera, and maintain ground clearance.

The camera was a bit disappointing, I paid a few bucks extra for the 2MP camera but it's still no camera ship for serious video or stills. Controlling the camera takes a few experiments. The quad has a TF card slot for recording video and stills, but there are a few tricks to operation.

Firstly, I found that if I'm recording with the TF card in, videos don't seem to go to the smartphone app. But sometimes they do go to both...The drone slow flashes the clearance lights to indicate the video is running, but remember always to shut off recording before turning off power or you'll lose the whole video.

Secondly, I found that even recording to the TF card I'd get occasional noise line bursts across the video. I'm not sure if there's a slightly dodgy connection somewhere or what, but it happens even when the craft is sitting on the ground so possibly it's just something internal to the camera.

As I said, it's not meant to be a serious camera ship, just a way to record some airborne video to maybe share online. In general, the stills were good, and the video doesn't get the noise too often so I can live with that.

One last thing, if I left the TF card out and used the phone remote controls, it recorded and snapped stills flawlessly to the phone. (More on controller interaction weirdnesses further down this review.)

The remote control is a plastic games controller type thing and is pretty much standard for economy drones. Left stick controls throttle and yaw, right stick controls roll fore and aft, roll left and right, hence it steers the quad.

There's a small "+" type four way button under the left-hand stick, they don't tell you this, but in normal mode it (in theory) lets you adjust for left/right and fore/aft drift, and in headless mode (of which more in a second) it's supposed to control where the quad goes, but so does the right stick, and anyway you need your left thumb on the throttle so that feature's of limited use.

Under the right stick are a few buttons that are supposed to turn the video on and off, take a photo, set the quad into headless mode, and do the one key return. (I don't know why they bother on a craft without GPS, any "one key return" will be a wild guess at the best of times. But anyway. It's there if you want it.)

There is also a "take off" button and a "land/STOP" button, but they seemed to do nothing and may be for use in the more full-featured versions.

I've already covered the left-hand button for speed, and the right-hand button does 360 flips that I only tried twice, but the quad looks like it only needs a few metres off the ground to be safe, so flip away.

Headless mode was actually better than I'd been led to believe by other reviewers. Maybe because I'm a newbie and have never flown a GPS/Alt Hold quad before I have lower expectations, but it worked fine for me. If I set the headless mode with the quad on the ground, the left stick controlled the direction of the quad so that push up meant fly in the original "forward" direction no matter how I spun the quad around, stick back meant fly in the original "backward" direction, and so forth.

I don't like to do headless mode anyway because at some stage, you're going to have to fly the quad coming straight towards your head with the left and right stick directions needing to be mentally flipped, and that's just a fact of life so I prefer to get used to flying old school without too many aids.

Stuff I liked less: The caveat about stopping the video recording before switching off the quad. How many times I've forgotten that and lost a video...argh! (The only way around that would be to use the smartphone app to record videos but then you're stuck with Wi-Fi interference, loss of signal, and so forth.)

And the fact that both battery and TF card can pop out if you jar the XS809W hard enough in a crash. I only had the card come loose once but I imagine it'd be hard to find if it flew right out. And of course, if the battery comes out before you can stop the video, that's the same as turning it off before you stop recording, bye-bye ten minutes of video...

There's a smartphone app. OMG.

There's a smartphone app. Yep, you can fold the quad's arms in, take it and leave the remote gamepad behind, and fly and record just using your phone. In theory...

In practice, there are several ways to fly the XS809W and the app is probably the one I liked the least. My smartphone isn't powerful so there's a bit of lag in the controls, as mentioned earlier, Wi-Fi video has inherent lag, and so I found that between looking at the screen to make sure I had my thumbs on the "control sticks" and then losing the position and having to look again, I had almost no time to start or stop videos, take photos, or have fun.

Weird Controller Interactions Weirdness

Best way I've found is to clamp the phone into the built-in holder on the gamepad-like remote, connect the phone to the Wi-Fi, open the app and hit "play" then switch on the remote and let that connect, and only then press "On" on the smartphone app.

Then use the gamepad controller to start/stop videos, take pictures, etc. (The smartphone app didn't seem able to override the controller, and seemed to be locked out of recording video, but I'm no expert and perhaps there's a way to record video on both, I don't know.)

There's a button for setting headless mode on the app, a button for 360 flips, and a "gyro" button that is supposed to let you fly the drone by waving your phone about. It didn't work all that well for me, partly because of the lag in the phone and the lag in the Wi-Fi connection. You may enjoy using these modes.

There's also a "course draw" mode, but without GPS or altitude hold you still have to manage the aircraft, so mostly of little use.

There are other apps out there that can generally fly a Wi-Fi drone; you may find one that's better. I actually enjoy flying the old school way. So I like the controller and will keep the phone app for those situations where you need a backup controller and for seeing how I'm framing the videos and shots.

Conclusion

You could find a better camera drone with more features, but not at this price. As I'm a pensioner, even this price was only affordable as the result of saving up pennies. I was just lucky that my saving up, a Paypal error that they corrected and paid me an inconvenience fee for, and the 30% price drop all coincided to make this happen.

The thing is forgiving of klutz pilots like me. It's tough and resilient, flies well in moderate breezes, has a decent whack of speed if you need it, the 2MP camera is not as rubbishy as the 0.3MP cameras most cheap camera/FPV drones are fitted with, and it gets decent range and flying time for what it is.

As a very new newbie, I can recommend it because it teaches you a lot of aircraft/camera ship/FPV basics and is quite forgiving. And if it pays the ultimate price for my sloppy flying then it's not a $2,000 loss. My next purchases for it are another set of spare props (in case they go out of production) and a bundle of three batteries and a triple charger so that I can go out flying for a day and not have to worry about recharging.