I fly FPV drones, I have one very similar to that size. running a 1s 300mah lihv I get about 3 to 5 minutes. 5 minutes damages the battery. but the tiny lihv never liv long enough anyways.

I'd expect it to get close to that time, but it has so much more plastic around it. but then again it's not transmitting video.

That matches with the estimate in another comment chain[1]. That is low enough that listing it will likely be off-putting to many potential customers. It is why I think it is misleading to try to hide that number with a more opaque metric.

[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31195956

So how does this drone stack against the competition? I know nothing about this field and I expected a price around a 100 mark. 250 sounds like a lot.

Can you recommend a good starter FPV drone?

The standard advice is: Buy a transmitter and practise for like 5-10 hours in the simulator before pulling the trigger on a real one. Radiomaster Zorro, Jumper T-Pro, TBS Mambo are some good ones. Go directly for ExpressLRS/TBS Tracer long range protocols so you wont have to worry about your quad falling out of sky because of range issues.

If you want something that is more "ready to fly" (goggles, quadcopter, transmitter combo) You do have more choices these days:

1) On the more expensive end - You have DJI FPV combo [1]. Is supposedly very beginner friendly. https://store.dji.com/product/dji-fpv?vid=101601

2) On the low end - Something like this https://www.getfpv.com/emax-tinyhawk-ii-freestyle-micro-brus...

The problem with these ready to fly combos - especially on the low end (analog video) is that, you end up getting very toy like transmitter and goggles, that wont be of much use for you once you want to buy/build more quadcopters. So I highly recommend getting the transmitter and goggles separately.

Thanks! My preference would be to start really cheap just to see if I like the hobby and want to stick with it. I don’t think I’d mind buying a better transmitter later.

Commenting I like the bicopter design has advanced features like follow user mode and long flight time

They're probably too ashamed of the actual value in minutes...

Reminds me of some internal corporate presentations: when the numbers are good they show percentage increase and when they're bad the show absolute values, and when they're really bad they "forget" to give the time range of that absolute value...

If you're using this for Snap, one "flight" is actually a pretty reasonable time unit. Snapchat videos can be a maximum of one minute.

So far as I can tell there are no real spec numbers anywhere. No video size/framerate/resolultion specs I could find (admittedly I only spent 1 or 2 mins clicking around looking for them).

Which kinda indicates the target market they're gonna aim this at. This is for people who want to know "Can I upload the video to Snapchat?" not for people who are wondering "Is this 1080p? Or 720? Surely it can't be 4k?"

I prefer sample videos to specs, because specs are pretty much worthless. The 2021 Macbook Pro has a 1080p camera, but the actual quality is worse than the 720p camera in the 2015 Macbook Pro.

The website has some sample videos, and you can tell the quality is very poor compared to pro drones, but definitely good enough to share with friends and family.

There are if you follow "Pixie Support" link in the footer, here are the specs you were looking for:

Images Standard: 4000 x 3000 (12MP)

Video Default: 2.7k Frame rate: Up to 30 FPS

https://support.pixy.com/hc/en-us/articles/5039928089236-Pix...

I have no idea on how many minutes it takes to get a photo. I personally like their metric choice.

I'm not sure that I follow what you are saying. Are you suggesting the expectation is that each flight yields one photo? It takes milliseconds not minutes to take a photo. I would expect this thing to be taking photos nearly continuously during flight which would make flight time the most informative metric.

Their target market measures the value of this thing in number of Snapchat Stories it can create so really the flights does make more sense. Their target market isn't going to want to divide 3 minutes by 20 seconds.

I don't think you're their target demographic.

What is this supposed to mean?

"Flights" is a bad metric if they don't define it. Whatever your age, gender, income, it doesn't change that it's meaningless.

Each flight is a snapchat story appropriate sub-minute interval, like 15-40 seconds sort of thing. I really don't want to sound condescending, but if that isn't immediately obvious then you aren't the target audience.

I’m not a Snapchat user and I just looked through the videos on my phone and I have tons that are in the 15 to 25s range. In fact I have hardly any that are longer than 30s. Short segments of drone video from a durable device you can throw in a bag seem fun and useful.

Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo? That is rather condescending to their customers. Battery life seems like a basic thing someone might want to know before spending a few hundred bucks on something like this.

>Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo?

I agree that it's condescending, but it's also obvious to me that there is a growing market trend to sell to a class of people that simply buy the Next Big Thing without ever learning about it, using it, or questioning the motivations behind it.

In a way that's a great group to capitalize on, they may lack the education or desire to ask the tough questions, they don't actually use the product so you don't really need to support them well, and they tend to buy oriented strongly with advertisement.

When I see a technical product marketed this way -- bright colors, flashy every-person advertisement, zero-training-required, no real technical specs -- I always imagine that it's in that class of product. Sort of the opposite of 'prosumer' classed product.

A titch bit more useful than a Funko Pop doll until The Next Next Big Thing is released by BigCo , the firmware gets dated, the batteries die and remain unreplacable due to a lack of support for The Old Big Thing, and then BigCo drops software support due to trying to shove people into the new model, and then it becomes under-bed trash with a dangerous LiPo in it.

> Asking for clarification on battery life means I'm not their target demo?

Precisely

The default flight is 30 seconds.

I don’t fault them for this specifically. IIRC the 30 minute airtime standard is some kind of FAA regulation; it’s not a differentiator one way or another between drone products.

This drone will definitely get nowhere near 30 minutes.