 Alright, this is the brand new Hover Camera X1, it's a brand new, affordable, compact and very portable drone that I've just bought on Indiegogo, I purchased this in the early bird pricing for $329 which comes with this combo pack, I'm going to showcase how to use all of the different modes with some demo footage, how to use this as a manual controlled drone as well, but ideally this is perfect for beginners to get used to drone flying and I'm really excited to showcase what this can do, so let's go ahead and show you what comes in the box, go over the design and the specs and showcase some sample footage outdoors, so let's get straight into it. So in the combo pack you have these three little boxes that come with it, the camera, the charging hub and a spare battery and these are all of the accessories, USB-C charging cable, a nice carry case for the drone, the drone itself which I'll go over in a second, use a manual with some information which I highly recommend you read for the first time, the charging case for two battery slots and a spare battery here, one of the batteries are already on top of the drone so let's go ahead and take a look at the design of this, now this is a very lightweight pocket friendly drone because technically this can fit in your pocket and I have carried it in my pocket when I was testing this out, this is only 125 grams and this is made of plastic material just to hold the propellers in place there, but the design is very nice, it actually comes in two colors black and white, I decided to go for the black one, the first time you use this you're going to need the Hover X1 app for iOS or Android to activate it and then you can actually use this as a self flying drone without the need for the app at all, it's very simple how it works, you have the options for all of the different modes here, I'll showcase that in a second just to cover a little bit about the design as well, at the bottom you have these sensors there so that it can detect your palm of your hand when you want take-off and landing and that's going to be very important when you are starting to use this drone for the first time, you've got yourself the camera on the gimbal here this is a 2.7k 30 frames per second camera but you can also shoot in 1080p 60 frames per second and 1080p 30 frames per second with HDR on, now I just want to highlight here that just because it is 2.7k that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get the highest quality footage because there's also a lot of things that this does not have in terms of the hardware that makes it a very premium quality video camera, you have to remember that this does not have all of the latest technology in terms of the hardware inside the lens, it doesn't have a Sony CMOS sensor for example, it's a very basic lens and you'll see the video quality when I take the footage, just above the lens there is an LED light which will light up green, white and red showcasing various things and you'll see that when I go out but once it's starting it's shoot and you've gone into one of the modes, it will go red when it's recording like you do with any SLR camera, it goes green when it's on standby and it's ready to start flying, now let's take a look at some of these modes here, the first mode there is hover, the second one is reveal, the next one is follow, the fourth one is orbit, the fifth one is bird's eye and that last one there with a star icon is called custom, now custom you can switch between two different custom modes, snapshot mode and also a video mode which you can use as a dolly tracking video and I'll showcase in the app where to change that, the snapshot mode on this allows you to take pictures which you can very easily do with the app and you can also do burst shots so plenty of different options to do this, now to turn this on you just hold down the power button there for a few seconds, two or three seconds and it will turn on, it won't start flying but the first time you do try this make sure you do test it out outdoors rather than indoors, so if you hold this down the green light will come on at the front showcasing that the drone is now on, you get a little battery indicator which is nice so you've got four LEDs there, so as you heard it shows you what the current mode is, if I press the mode button it will speak what the next mode is, so that's the follow the tracking mode, it will follow you wherever you go and then you can cycle through all of the different modes, now just going to show you the hover x1 app, you've got some sample footage there which comes on the app for everyone to see other shots that have been taken with this around the world, then you've got a navigation pane along the bottom, you go into hover, this is where you will need to activate the camera for the first time, because I have already pre-connected it you can see everything is now connected, I've taken a few shots already but at the top there you'll be able to see how many gigabytes of storage is remaining, this has a 32 gigabyte internal memory and unfortunately you can't expand that with an SD card or a micro SD slot, it's all internal and 32 gigabyte is the limit, so this is a very basic drone for those people that would mainly use this to grab a few B-roll footage using these types of unique shots, if you go into mode this is where you can see more information and learn how to use all of the modes and the different things that you can do with it, one thing I have to mention is for the manual control to be enabled you need to have flown the drone at least five times with all of the other modes, then the manual control will be unlocked, that's more of a security feature for you to get used to flying it, how to do the takeoff and landing for you to be able to successfully use the drone with a manual control, when you do use manual controls you can then move it around with the two different joysticks to angle the drone however you like, including repositioning the gimbal and the camera facing it up and down and making sure you get the most perfect smooth footage for your shots, now if I go back into hover settings, this is where you can change all of the settings, so you have all of the different modes listed here, like I mentioned with the custom mode you can also change it from dolly track to snapshot, you can also change the height as well for the birds eye view, so for example it's set to 16 feet, if you want it to go a little bit higher than that then of course you can set that there and plenty of other settings to change the resolutions and whichever fits your needs, now sound recording, I always recommend to leave this off because the drone is pretty loud with all of the propellers on and you're not going to get any sound or audio recording directly from this if you do turn that on, so I always make sure I record my audio with a separate camera, maybe at a further distance from the drone if you do want to use this to record what people are saying, so I highly recommend just to leave that off because the audio quality it will be very bad and if you want to access the album you need to connect to the drone's wifi which will automatically pop up and have you select it by itself which is quick and easy to do, but after you've done that for the first time the next time if you don't want to use the phone and an app then you can just use all of these modes manually and the camera will essentially be self flying and will do everything for you and everything will be stored in the drone's internal memory so that you can access it via the app at a later stage, so the setup is very quick and easy and now there's nothing left to do then to head outside and try out all of these modes and showcase how they look and see what you guys think, but I always recommend when you do hold it out in your palm make sure your fingers never go inside the cage so it might hit the propeller, so keep an eye out for that because it's quite large enough for your fingers to fit through and the last thing you want to do is have that trapped in there, so keep it open keep your palm steady and in front of you at eye level especially when you do takeoff and landing, when you turn it on you'll see the green light, select a mode and then when you're ready to fly then you just hold it down for another three seconds you'll hear audio confirmation and then it will hover right about 20 centimeters above your palm and then it will do its shot so let's go ahead and then once we've done that and had a look at all the footage I'll go through all of the pros and cons for what I think about this drone so let's take a look so to activate the drone simply turn it on by holding the button down for a few seconds until you see the green light you follow the instructions on the app to connect it to bluetooth and it should take off and land on your palm as a test now every video you're about to see shot with this drone will be in 2.7k and the first mode I've started with the custom snapshot mode which takes pictures of you every five or so seconds until you place your hand under the drone to make it land on your palm the photos as you can see were actually pretty decent and came out pretty well with this tiny 12 megapixel camera so let's take a look at more samples so now let's stitch the phone and start off with hover mode this simply hovers in place but turns to follow you whichever direction you go in next in reveal mode the drone will pan upwards and away from you at a set distance from the app the default is 10 feet and then simply comes back down and this is one of the modes that will give you only 10 seconds of footage in follow mode the drone will start following you wherever you go and it can actually follow you with speeds up to 20 kilometers per hour so if you ride a bike for example it can keep up with your ride it's also worth noting that this can follow you not just from behind but also from the front which i think is a great option to have as i speed up with running you can see the drone got higher to make sure i'm always center frame orbit mode pretty self-explanatory it does a 360 circular orbit around you to create a 15 second clip birds eye can be customized to go up to 50 feet in the air from the app but i've left it on the default 16 feet with no rotation and just the linear up and down movement now finally i'm doing a manual control mode here which you can find at the bottom right in the app and when you hit this it will ask to connect to the drone's wi-fi so that you can get a live preview once you see the pop-up you simply hit join and wait for it to connect once connected the preview loads with two joysticks a shutter button and the gimbal control so you take off the drone and then head back to the app and when you are ready you hit this black shutter button to start the recording because this won't auto record like the other modes and you can start moving it yourself so now you can see i'm moving it forward and the footage is actually very stable which is nice especially since it's a bit windy out on this day using both joysticks simultaneously to change the direction movement and height also seems pretty fluid pretty stable and hardly any shake is involved which is also very nice to see and when you're finished you just bring the drone back as close as you can place your palm underneath and it will stop okay so you saw all of that footage now i just want to cover a few pros and cons about the drone itself so let's start off with the pros number one this is very well designed i love this compact foldable design of it it's so easy to take with you anywhere you want literally just put it in your pocket if you wanted to so let me show you an example once you've just folded it no one will ever know that you actually have a drone in your pocket so i just like the design of it and you don't have to worry about the propellers being open as well it safeguards you as well with this cage all around and just the fact that it looks quite nice and people actually don't know what this is when you do fold it and then you surprise them that it's actually a drone i think they you know thought about this very well and i really like the design of this number two this is great to take b-roll footage if you just want to capture yourself maybe using a product or spending time with your friends or family even if you're at an event or a party or a wedding you're having a barbecue anything like that you can get some really cool shots by just setting this up with any of the modes getting those b-roll footage and just transferring it to your phone and then over to your laptop such a quick and easy way to do this as part of your creative workflow number three i was actually quite impressed with the stabilization with the footage as well this has something called triple stabilization hybrid anti-shake technology quite a long name but actually it did perform quite well it was about medium strength winds outdoors even then it was doing a very good job combating that to make sure it stays as stable as possible especially when it does the follow mode for example so i really can't fault that but the stabilization is always the most important part when you want to capture drone footage the last thing you want is once you've transferred everything over you start to see a lot of shaky footage and that wasn't that much of a case with this so great job on the stabilization number four and like i mentioned especially for beginners you actually don't even need an app to fly this you only need the app to activate it for the first time but afterwards even if you leave your phone indoors and you want to quickly go outside and grab some b-roll footage with some of these modes just go ahead turn it on select the mode and let it do the rest the fact that it's all independent makes it self-flying that's the thing i really like about this and that can go a very long way i can see a lot of drones in the future that will use this self-flying concept coming out in more of the higher end the very premium drones and that's going to be very exciting to see number five is the price you know $329 especially with a spare battery in there you get the battery charger the whole combo pack i think that is a very affordable price for kind of a premium quality drone that if you are going to compare it with how much people spend on more of the high-end drones like dji ones that range from like seven to a thousand dollars and beyond this actually is very affordable in relation to that if you're going to maybe use this once in a while maybe once a month or even less often than that then i think this definitely warrants the price you pay and it gives you great value for that price so now let's talk a little bit about the cons so number one the video quality now of course 2.7k if you're new to drone flying or even filmmaking you might hear this resolution and think oh it's going to be great quality 2.7k shot on this and 2.7k shot on my iPhone 14 for example are going to be two completely different things you have to think about the quality of the lens that even the manufacturers will make a difference about who has developed the lens you have to think about the sensors that are involved so many different things and this doesn't have like a high aperture as well which will allow it to shoot in low lighting conditions or anything like that so a lot of the footage unless it's very bright and sunny and super clear it would be quite clear enough and it's decent enough to use as b-roll footage but i don't think you'd be able to use any of this as your primary a-roll footage for your filming or your shots so if you're going to shoot primarily for a you know very expensive wedding i don't think this is the drone to do that but nonetheless it's good enough and decent enough to get all of your b-roll daytime shots if that's something that you want to do especially if you're new to drone flying number two is about the battery life now they mentioned that you can do about 10 minutes of flying with just one battery that's about 20 times using any of these modes so the battery will run out quite quickly it's not that long but then again you have to remember that this is a very tiny compact portable drone and it's quite lightweight so when it is trying to you know struggle with the wind for example it's going to work a lot harder and it's going to consume more power and that will reduce the battery life a bit more so if you are going to use this for a specific event then i feel like you may need to have maybe five or ten spare battery packs with you and keep charging at the same time because this will run out very quickly number three the wind resistance now while i was shooting i would say from time to time there was about medium to strong winds and when it was in hover i can see it trying to fight the wind and resist it from shaking but there was at some instances in my footage where i saw the shake and that's no fault of the drone because it is a very lightweight and it's made to tackle wind but they mentioned that this has level four wind resistance for the most part it actually did a pretty decent job trying to combat the wind but i would never recommend to try and take this out even if you have like medium to strong strength winds out there because this will give you a little bit of shake in your footage number four this is kind of a minor one but when you have to reveal and the bird's eye modes on this it actually splits the footage into two parts i would prefer it just has one part for everything the first part it records and saves to the internal memory is when it's moving away from you the second part is when it's coming back to you for the landing i'd rather have it just as one part and allow me to just spit it out in post editing but not a major issue and i kind of see why they've done that but overall for all of the other modes you've got the constant recording anyway so there's plenty of other things and workarounds to combat that so that covers all of my pros and cons let me know what you guys think and how you found this drone i think they're on the right track as well especially with the market to be you know filled with drones that are very portable compact and more importantly affordable for the mass market it's in the right step i really like this drone i'm going to be keeping this i'm going to try and use this more and more in my videos to get some b-roll footage i'm going to be more using this with the manual controls because i prefer getting the footage exactly what i like but if any instances that i like to showcase a specific product then i can stand next to that product and use any of these other modes and that would give me a decent enough shot to get what i'm looking for let me know in the comments down below all of your thoughts if you have any questions about this as always ask me and i'll get back to you as soon as i can if you like this make sure to drop a like on the video make sure to subscribe and i'll see you guys at the next one take care