The Parrot AR.Drone is a $300 toy. That's a lot of money to drop on something you'll fly around your home or at the park. After playing with the hardware, however, that price is more than acceptable: there is a whole lot of technology crammed into that lightweight frame. This is a quadrocopter with two cameras, an onboard computer running Linux, and the ability to play virtual games with real-world hardware. If you're into flying toys, playing with software, or simply finding new and novel uses for your iPhone, you'll find something to love here.

Plus, this is a very effective platform for instilling terror and respect into your cats or small children. The value of such things cannot be overstated.

What you get

Your $300 gets you:

The quadrocopter with the two built-in video cameras

Two hulls, one designed for indoor flight and the other for outdoor

The battery pack

The charger

Instruction manual

A set of brightly colored stickers for augmented reality games

The hulls slide onto the unit's base and attach via magnets, and can be swapped out in seconds. Both are made of lightweight styrofoam, and even after extensive testing and a few bad crashes we didn't break either. Parrot offers replacement parts and repair instructions on its site just in case anything goes wrong, meaning a bad crash isn't the end of the world. That's a very good thing, because this is a device that takes both skill and practice to pilot effectively.

Don't worry about learning, though; the drone helps you along by stabilizing itself and adjusting its flying level without your direct help. The bottom of the drone features an ultrasound altimeter so it knows how high it's flying and can keep its altitude steady. That means if you are flying over gentle hills or obstructions, it will bob up and down appropriately. The drone also comes with an accelerometer and two gyroscopes to keep things level and running smoothly. The brain powering the drone is a custom-built Linux system with a 468Mhz ARM9 processor, 128MB of memory, and a WiFi router that lets your iPhone connect with it. Parrot is not messing around here—this is a very smart toy.

Flying is an interesting experience. You tap a virtual button on your iPhone, and the drone takes off and hovers. By placing your thumb on the left side of the screen you take over, allowing you to go forward and backward, and to strafe left and right. Move your thumb across the left side of the screen to control altitude, and turn to control yaw. It's somewhat intuitive, but you'll need some practice before you can do anything really crazy. Video from the drone's front and bottom cameras is shown on your iPhone.

If the propeller hits a solid object, power is cut to the engines and the drone falls to the Earth. If you're done flying you can tap the land button and the drone slowly eases to the ground. You can manually hit an emergency button on your iPhone to likewise cut power to the engines. You'll need to learn where the landing and emergency cut-off switches are quickly, since you're going to crash. Often.

Can it be killed?

I was warned to take it easy on my first few flights, and to stand directly behind the drone to make turning easy. When you tilt your iPhone forward the drone moves forward, but once you start turning the drone using the yaw control, you'll have to quickly acclimate to the fact that "forward" is now left. If the drone is facing you, the forward and backward movements are reversed. With a little practice you'll intuitively be able to deal with the controls, but it does take practice. I was proud when I was successfully able to fly around trees, or circle-strafe a standing person while keeping the camera pointed at them.

But still, I crashed. I crashed hard and often. Amazingly, the drone suffered only one instance of a scuffed propeller, and I was able to swap it out in a few minutes. Parrot sells replacement parts and hosts video tutorials that explain how to replace or repair all the major parts. After accidentally slamming it into concrete walls, landing too hard, or even getting attacked by a cat who was tired of being buzzed, the drone was fine. If you ding the hull, you can repair it with tape or buy a replacement for that as well.

We were ultimately impressed by how much punishment it could take with no ill effects. It shrugged off crashes that made us wince.

The controls can be adjusted and tweaked on the iPhone, giving you some fine control over how you'd like to fly, but you can also simply opt for maximum stability at the expense of maneuverability; it's all a matter of what you're comfortable with. It was interesting to see what happened when my wife called me during a tense flight—the drone simply decreased power and landed softly on the grass. Neat!

You can change the display to watch the video feed from the nose of the drone or the downward-facing camera, or you can show both in a sort of picture-in-picture mode. The framerate on the cameras is not spectacular—the 640X480 front-facing camera shoots at 15 FPS while the 176X144 downward-facing camera can shoot up to 60fps—but it gets the job done. Since we weren't able to test any of the augmented reality games, no one who flew it looked down at the screen anyway. Sadly, there is no button to take a screenshot; you must hit the home and power button at the same time on your iPhone to take a photo. Doing this while flying takes some serious skill.

And flying is an absolute joy. While turning and doing complicated maneuvers will take hours of practice, it feels great. We passed the iPhone around a group of people and everyone had a blast with it, and even the drone itself was a conversation piece. Watching as it hovers and zooms around is amazing. Having a large area to really cut loose is recommended, even though the internal hull will allow you to practice indoors.

We were told to expect 15 minutes of flying time per 60-90 minute charge, but we were able to get to about 20 minutes depending on how hard we were taxing the drone. It's torture to be having such fun and then have to cool your heels while recharging the battery, so you may want to consider buying an extra battery or two if you plan on picking the drone up.

You'll also want to be careful about windy days; the drone can easily be buffeted around if the wind becomes too strong. Since the device is controlled via the iPhone's WiFi, there is also the possibility of interference, and you have a limited range. But luckily, if the connection is dropped the drone knows enough to either sit still and wait for more commands or to land. If any of the propellers hits a solid object, it will likewise switch off, and the propellers are soft enough that unless it hits your eye you won't be injured. To test this I crashed the drone into my son's head while practicing.

Because I totally meant to do that.

Wrapping it up

We've been promised more apps, including games and the ability to fly two drones and have them dog fight each other. Shoot your opponent down and power is cut to the engines and the enemy drone falls to the ground. I'm not sure how many people are going to know someone else who owns one of these, but it still sounds fun. Sadly, this software wasn't available in time for the review. The API is also open and available to anyone who wants to try programming new tricks for the hardware; we hope to see some neat things in this area in the coming months.

Yes, $300 is expensive, but you get more than what you pay for. The AR.Drone is fun to fly, easy to fix and keep going, and hardy enough that you can open it up and really do some neat things without fear of losing your investment. If the software community embraces it, there will no end to the fun things it can do, but for now we had a great time simply enjoying the way it flew.

You can buy the drone now from Brookstone. Ars Technica was provided a unit to test, and it was sent back to the manufacturer after a few weeks of use.