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Turbo Drone RC Quadrocopter – hands on review

Posted by Roo - 11/11/12 at 02:11:15 pm

The nice people at Paramountzone sent me a Turbo Drone four channel remote controlled quadrocopter to review.

It’s 36cm across (including the rotors, which are 13.5cm each), making it just about small enough to fly indoors.

The 500mAh 3.7v li-po rechargeable battery makes it conveniently easy to get spares; I had the exact same battery laying around in another remote controlled chopper.

It takes 45 minutes to charge using the supplied charger, and gives about 10 minutes of flying time.

The red bit at the top of the remote control makes it look as though it’s going to be an infra-red job, but it’s actually 2.4 Ghz with (apparently) a 100m range. That’s pretty impressive,

It claims to be suitable for both indoor and outdoor flight (in ‘fairly calm conditions’) which, while I have yet to try it outdoors, I can definitely believe. Since my back garden is a terrifying tangle of trees I’ll probably be taking it to the local park to try out longer distance flight.

The remote has an excellent feature in which the level of responsiveness can be adjusted between four modes:

• 20% – good for getting started, but soon feels a bit sluggish
• 40% – responds a bit more quickly and feels more nimble
• 60% – twitchy fun. Probably about as high as you’ll go most of the time indoors
• 100% – insanity mode in which the remote beeps constantly, perhaps to remind you that any move of the right stick is going to make it instantly flip 360°

The Turbo Drone RC Quadrocopter is a seriously nice little toy, and you should seriously consider it as a Christmas present to yourself. It’s stable and responsive (with the adjustable sensitivity on the remote allowing you to choose exactly how brave you want to be) and I’m finding it more fun to fly than similarly sized co-ax helicopters.

Lightspeed phone controlled i-Helicopter – hands on review

Posted by Roo - 10/12/11 at 03:12:41 pm

The nice people at Paramountzone were kind enough to send me a Lightspeed i-Helicoter to review.

It’s an iPhone / iPad / iPod / Android controlled helicopter, and (having played with a few micro-copters in the past) I can honestly say this is the best I’ve seen.

Rather than a separate remote control, the controller is your phone/tablet in conjunction with a free app and a rechargable infrared transmitter, which plugs in to your headphone socket. Assuming you’ve got one of the supported devices, this is a great setup (Currently supported: iPhone, iPod, iPad, HTC Desire S, HTC Desire HD, HTC Incredible S, HTC Wild Fire, HTC Wild Fire S, HTC Hero, HTC Sensation, Samsung 9100, Samsung i9000, Moto MB525, LG P350. With more to come, apparently). No on-board video streaming to the phone though. Not that you’d really expect it for £30.

To fly it, after an initial charge, I simply installed the free iOS app on the iPad, plugged the IR dongle into the audio jack, and I was off.

There’s also an ‘motion control’ option; a mode which lets you control forward/back/left/right by simply tilting your device. I found this mode a tiny bit easier, though the altitude control still needs a careful thumb to control it.

20 minutes of charging (via USB) gets you about 10 minutes of flying time.

It’s bigger than I was expecting, and the metal frame means it feels satisfyingly sturdy.

At first I was a bit nervous about damaging it, but I’ve since crashed it into pretty much every surface in my house with no damage to show for it. I’ve not even had to open up the included bag of spare parts. I’m impressed at how sturdy and durable this thing is. By killing the power whenever I get in trouble, and just letting it fall out of the air, I’m now very confident about flying it around indoors.

The app includes a ‘Turbo’ button (“for when extra speed is required”) which I expect will be useful when flying in an open plan office. So far I’ve not needed it much in my house.

Cons: Unlike a regular remote control, using a glass screen means no feedback from the altitude control, which takes some time to get used to.
Pros: Fun, fast and easy to control. Gyroscopic helicopters are really good these days, but this one is remarkably strong and durable.

This is a really great toy. Highly recommended. If you’re interested in ordering one, here’s the UK/Europe (currently £29.99 with free delivery) or the USA (currently $59.99 with free worldwide shipping).

GX Buggy micro RC car – hands on review

Posted by Roo - 03/07/11 at 05:07:38 pm

The Tomy GX Buggy is a micro remote controlled car from Tomy, the people who bought you the Q-steer and, before that, the Char-G. I reckon they’ve managed to come up with something even more fun here, and was very pleased when I was offered a sample to review.

To get the obvious stuff out the way, the car is tiny and it’s fast. At 10 cm long, it easily sits in the palm of your hand and at a mere 42g weighs next to nothing. Tomy claims it will do up to 22km/h. I was sceptical at first, but having seen it in action I can believe it. It’s certainly more than fast enough for bombing around indoors. It takes about 20 minutes to charge using the portably charging unit (which takes 4 x AA batteries, not included). From that, you get about 10 minutes driving time.

For comparison, it’s about half the price of the Losi Micro T (though of course you lose a few features including proportional steering, full suspension and rubber tyres).

The GX Buggy remote control (which takes 2 x AAA batteries, not included) offers proportional acceleration, plus braking and reverse as well as (non-proportional, i.e. just left/straight/right) steering. I’d quite like proportional steering, obviously, but even without it the car is an awful lot of fun to drive.

The foam rubber tyres are perfect for indoor use, with good grip on both lino and carpet.

Since it’s so small and light, you’d expect it to flip over when it hits things and spend a lot of time upside down. It cleverly self-rights though thanks to a plastic ring, the ‘roll wing’, which (usually) puts it back on its tyres very pleasingly.

And, being so small and light, and with such good acceleration, it can jump really high even with quite a short run up.

I have not tried it outside yet, but while I think it’ll run ok on tarmac I would be a little nervous about how long the foam tyres would last. I would love to take it to a concrete skate park and see how it performs there though. Should be lot of fun in a half pipe.

Toshiba Qosmio G40

Posted by Roo - 06/12/08 at 12:12:49 am

I recently received an interesting offer from TalkToshiba; they offered to lend me a laptop on the condition that I write an honest review of it. I get to play with a nice toy for a few weeks, you (and they) get to hear how I got on with it. Sounds fair to me. Let me make that perfectly clear: if the offer had been on the condition that I write a positive review, I’d have said no. The fact that they asked me to “post up your thoughts about the laptop on your blog … whether they be good or bad” and being able to tell the truth about the machine is the only reason I even considered it.

Unpacking it (from a big, heavy box that I’d assumed would be mostly packing material. Oh no, it really is that size) my first reaction was that I had never seen a bigger, heavier laptop. Opening it, I was struck by the distinctive design. Shiny, intricate and odd. Over time, that wore off and I now think of it as odd, and more than a tiny bit irritating. That’s partly because this isn’t the right laptop for me. Commuting every day means I value portability. Don’t expect this to be portable. It truly is a desktop replacement. In fact, you’ll want to plug in a mouse and keyboard too, because the layout is pretty dreadful.

On the plus side, it is quite powerful, has every connection you’d ever need, and the sound quality is amazingly good. When it did sometimes feel sluggish, I blamed the fact it was running Windows Vista. Oh, how I hate Vista. That’s not Toshiba’s fault though, and I should have installed Linux really.

Here’s what it looks like. The speakers vents are huge, and the visual aesthetic here seems to be ‘turbine’.

It’s big. Here it is stacked up against my wife’s MacBook and my MacBook Pro. The two put together are almost exactly the same height as the G40.

And here it is up against my MacBook Air. Perhaps not a fair comparison, but look at it. Insanity.

It’s covered in unnecessarily bright and numerous blinkenlighten. Not very soothing on the eyes.

The biggest problem, especially given the machine’s generous proportions, is having a teensy-tiny trackpad with two teensy tiny buttons, with a fingerprint device right in the middle, just in the way. The design is, frankly, dreadful.

The MacBook Air, despite being a much smaller laptop, makes room for a good-sized trackpad. There’s no excuse for a monster like the Qosmio G40 to have me scratching around on a surface half the size.

Good points

• I liked having a fingerprint reader to log in. Probably my favourite thing about it, and the one feature I now miss on my MacBook Pro and Air
• Having 5 (!) USB ports, and good connectivity generally. HDMI, s-video, SD/Memory Stick etc, even coax TV-antenna, I was almost expecting to see a SCART socket on this thing
• Good speakers, nice and loud with the best and most sound quality I have ever heard on any laptop
• Reasonably powerful

Bad points

• Unnecessarily ugly with lots of wasted space. 17″ inch screen feels small
• The screen seemed quite dim too. Certainly dimmer than the Pro or Air, even when powered by mains and turned up all the way
• Dreadful layout: tiny little trackpad with tiny little mouse buttons and a fingerprint reader plonked in the middle of it making it even more uncomfortable to use. I like the fingerprint reader, it’s just in the wrong place. The whole layout somehow manages to feel sprawling and cramped at the same time; I kept pressing the navigation wheel thing on the right when reaching for Return (pressing the soft touch ‘back’ button)
• No way (that I found) of dimming the enormous numbers of decorative lights
• HD-DVD. Seriously. I think the battle between BluRay and HD-DVD has been decided, hasn’t it?

It’s doesn’t really matter though because, being over a year old now, Toshiba no longer sells this laptop. The G50 has an even bigger (and I hope brighter) screen, but I don’t think I’ll be buying on. I like my laptops to be something I can put on my lap without fear of injury, and I returned the G40 without being terribly sad to see the back of it. Thanks to TalkToshiba for the loan though.

(More photos on Flickr if you’re interested.)