Drone Review: Tozo/Flyster x8TW 'Sky Hunter'

I've been wanting to get into drones for a while. What stopped me is that the decent, good looking ones start at around $1,000 and the tier below that mostly resemble the toys you'd find in a cereal box.

However I recently found an attractive folding drone with good build quality on both the drone and the controller. It's not cheap feeling, it's very durable (having survived many crashes while I was learning to fly it) and has an all around impressive set of capabilities considering the price (as low as $53).

Here is the sexy sumbitch in all its unfolded glory. Being black and minimalist, it matches the rest of my gear. Clearly this is not a serious drone. Flight time is around 5-7 minutes depending whether you use the fpv feature and how fast you've set the top speed. I mostly get around 6 minutes.

It does indeed fold up very small, which is handy if you want to e-bike out to where you're gonna fly it like I do. I could clip this to my belt or some sort of rear seatpost mount on the bike if I wanted to. The propellers fold away and apparently it's fine that they are loose as it makes no difference while in flight.

Here's the package it comes in. I drilled holes in the corners for air to rush in so I can get the lid off faster, obviously it doesn't come that way. The packaging makes a handy carry case as well.

...Which is because of the nicely shaped foam lining. If I could find a case with these exact dimensions I'd just plop the foam lining into that. Maybe I can have one 3D printed.

Controller looks nice. Doesn't feel cheap or plasticky, has some sort of rubberized finish for good grip and a fold-away clip for attaching your phone. That's so you can use the fpv feature where your phone shows a video stream from the drone's perspective.

It has its own little LCD display that shows you calibration info for the drone, connection strength, whether the bottom LED lights are on or off and so on. There's a strange down, then upward thumbstick motion you must do to "unlock" the drone before it will fly. Also another dual thumbstick gesture necessary to pair the drone to the controller's frequency when you first use it.

The underside. It does indeed have fold-away landing 'legs', which many of the cheaper drones do not. The battery compartment door has air holes to prevent the battery from getting too hot, though it's still pretty warm by the end of a flight. What looks like a slot for a micro SD card is blocked and apparently not intended to be used.

I found out by researching that there's a yet cheaper version of this drone without fpv, but you can record video to a microSD card. On that model, the slot is unblocked and functional. I suppose there was no point to including both.

Here's the battery. Pretty much the only thing I dislike about this drone. Not because of the flight time (other small drones manage 9-10 minutes) but because it's a rare size. There's one size in particular that is extremely common, but they didn't use that.

What makes it especially shitty is that it looks very close to the same size as the more common format from certain angles. As a result I actually bought what I thought was a spare battery for this drone only for it to arrive and not fit in the battery compartment:

It's clear this way that it won't fit. But on the website I bought it from, the only photo was from an angle with some forced perspective going on that made it look shorter and squatter, as if it was the same battery type.

Since then I managed to find a source for the correct size of battery, but it's a sketchy Chinese wholesale type of site with minimum order amounts. A few suppliers let me buy just a couple, so I did, as well as an octopus style charger that can charge 5 of these suckers off one USB port.

The charger it comes with will only charge one at a time. Adequate to get started, but I strongly recommend springing for 4 additional batteries from this site, since the octopus charger can handle five at a time. You'll also want a power bank to charge them from. If you have solar, you can just use that to charge the power bank, then use that to charge drone batteries.

This way you don't have to leave your bag sitting in the sun while you wait for the drone batteries to recharge, the power bank just opportunistically soaks up whatever sun you catch while walking/cycling.

Anyways, here's some footage of me flying it:

As you can see it's potato quality, but that's to be expected for the price. It doesn't get significantly better than this without a sudden, steep increase in cost. The fact that it transmits the video over Wifi is probably part of the problem, this also limits the range of the drone to around 200 feet from the controller.

It's also easily tossed about by wind as you can see in the video, on account of how light and small it is. I flew it in a field surrounded by tall trees that block wind pretty well but the occasional strong gust still makes it through, and this little guy has to fight pretty hard to avoid being swept the fuck away to Mexico.