Zerotech Dobby UAV RC Pocket Drone Hands on Review

Zerotech has released its first pocket drone UAV, Zerotech Dobby, it is powered by Snapdragon 801 Quad core 2.3Ghz processor, Adreno 330 GPU, Six  Gyroscope, GPS, GLONASS, e-compass, barometer, 1080p camera, , brushless motor, optical flow sensor;which can fly, be stable automatically, visual following, has electronic image stability, understand voice and gesture recognition, etc. It is not only the tiniest UAV, but also is the first one with Snapdragon 801 Quad core processor in stock.

On the left is iPhone 6 and Zerotech Dobby right.

As is known to all, UAV has many different kinds of brands, but they are all clumsy and not so portable. And many companies have tried to narrow the UAV design, but they failed. Right now Qualcomm cooperated with Zerotech last year to use Snapdragon chipset which used in smartphone until now. So they open the door for the pocket RC Drones.

The other feature of Zerotech Dobby is that it can be folded. We can see the arm, propeller can be folded and hidden under the RC Drone.

When we open Dobby, we find the propeller didn’t use tight design, but let it flexible. When it flies, it depends on centrifugal force of motor to unfold the blade. This design will reduce the parts of drone to make it small. But this kind of design will affect the wind resistance and battery life with less efficiency to some extent. However, propeller plays very important role in dynamic system of UAV. Under same motor, the longer the blade is, the better wind resistance is, so does battery life.

From the picture, the maneuver radius of Zerotech Dobby blade is over the bottom of the RC Drone, it uses every inch length to strengthen wind resistance and battery life. But users must maintain the blade well. Because when the drone is flying, the blade will be affected to become curved in general. But if we don’t maintain well, the blade will be easy to hit the body which leads to out control.

Here is comparison of Dobby, iPhone 6 and Iphone 6 plus. When it folds, it even is smaller than iphone 6s plus, and similar to iphone 6.

Here is the Zerotech Dobby compared with DJI Phantom 3 battery. Its thickness is as similar large as DJI Battery.

From the side of Dobby, it’s very compact, two arms and two sets of blades can hide in the bottom of Dobby.

It’s noticed that Dobby doesn’t have landing aircraft, but land on the ground directly. Because there are light sensor parts and other parts, if the ground is not flat, it will damage the bottom of the drone. Maybe that’s the reason that Zerotech develops the palm landing function. Due to snapdragon chipset, Dobby has to add the little fan and ventilation port at the bottom of the drone. Zerotech Dobby main camera uses point-of-view lens which is different from other camera, it uses 4K camera for video collection. And by Snapdragon 801 chipset, cutting and merging in 4k video to keep real-time stabilization, and then output 1080p video stabilization.

The biggest problem of camera is the pitch angle. From the picture, camera was adjusted by us manually, but we can use phone app to remote adjusted the camera angle. We usually use angle up in aerial, but if we adjust the camera manually, it will not be very convenient for aerial. It’s said Zerotech Dobby will adjust camera angle by app in the near future. But Zerotech Dobby is used for taking selfie mainly,even though Zerotech hopes users to fly it outdoor.

We also can see Zerotech Dobby comes with light flu positioning system (ultrasonic set high, camera positioning).