Hello all,

Looking at Birthday ideas for my 9 year old, and a drone has cropped up as a potential idea. Not looking for a stratosphere cruising monster, just something small, safe, easy and reliable. Any ideas? Battery life seems to be an issue on some of them.

Thanks.

If they’re a Star Wars fan, I saw these reduced massively yesterday, even come with a free t-shirt at the moment;

https://www.iwantoneofthose.com/clothing/star-wars/drones.list

https://m.dji.com/product/tello?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIgr-Qr9qK3gIVSOR3Ch27owkgEAQYASABEgL8KfD_BwE

What’s your budget and do you want an indoor or outdoor model? A couple of years ago I bought a cheapish (£100) Parrot drone/quadcopter just to mess about with indoors (it auto-hovered which was a selling point for me). I got bored of it after a couple of weeks so gave it to my 10 year old nephew, I think he got bored of it quickly to. I can imagine the appeal soon fades unless you’re getting into outdoor flying & filming but that gets spendy.

The Star Wars ones are great (and a bargain at that price) – I have the Speeder Bike – but they’re quite grunty, and probably not the easiest to fly.

What are you wanting from a drone? Will he enjoy using the controls or would he have more fun with something simpler? Outdoor or indoor?

I’ve used one of these motion control drones before (I used to work for MenKind) and they’re actually pretty decent (there’s a red one for a fiver less, but I can’t quite tell if it’s the same model). Much easier to control if you’re not comfortable with the twin sticks, and easy to set up so the power is limited. Useless outdoors in anything less than complete stillness, but ideal indoors. Obviously not much use if you want to teach him how to fly ‘properly’ though.

**edit** I’d agree with the above, the middle ground is a bit pointless. Cheap toy for a bit of fun = great, expensive flying camera = great, inbetween = expensive toy that’s not actually that much more fun.

Get something cheap and tough to start with, as it will get crashed. Also I think manual controls are good, as you learn more about flying it.

Something like Syma X5 is not bad, about £30 or so. Its a reasonable size for flying outdoors. Batteries last about 5 minutes, so worth buying a few spares. The camera is pretty rubbish, but still can be fun to get a few photos.

+ 1 for Syma x5 , cracking little drone to learn the basics on, still have my first one 🙂 ….. moved on a bit now and build my own etc

Thanks for all the ideas. Those Star Wars drones look like a good deal but I’m not sure the cat would appreciate a 35mph missile aimed at it. Might go for a Syma x5 as it seems to do quite a lot, is a good price and gets good reviews. I like the idea of a controller so that should do the trick.

Cheers.

The X5 is a decent flyer, but it’s pretty big for indoor flying (unless you have a very big house) and from what I remember doesn’t handle wind brilliantly. You might find that limits flight time quite a bit.