Tello Drone

Drone Buyers Club

When the Tello drone landed on our doorstep we were super excited to get out and get it in the air! Here are our thoughts on DJI and RyzeTech’s latest collaboration drone in our Tello drone review.

Form Factor

The first thing you notice when you pick up Tello is how light it is, it only weighs 80 grams (under the drone registration weight). Its such a simple design, one button on the side to switch it on an off and a micro usb on the other side to charge it. The battery is removable and simply slides in and out of the body, this allows you to replace the battery for additional flight time.

Durability

The Tello drone is very robust for its price tag, it has a good sturdy solid frame. An added bonus is that it comes with the removable prop guards. Propellers are also easily replaceable if they damaged. Our Tello drone has taken a couple of crashes and is still in one piece. We can reassure you they all happened in manual flight mode and were due to our inability to see obstacles.

Battery Life and Flight Time

With a full battery DJI and RyzeTech claim that you can get 13 minutes flight times out of theTello. The majority of flights I have had came in at around 10 minutes, just short of that figure. The battery life is short but replacement batteries can be bought and the drone has a micro usb port which is great for changing it on the go. It takes just over an hour to charge the battery.

Price

In terms of price its kind of a unique package, nothing out there really offers the same camera specs bundled with the kind of flight features that the Tello can offer. It sits somewhere between the FPV version of the Parrot Mambo and the ZeroTech Dobby. For the price Tello packs in some fantastic onboard tech and flight features and is really a breed of its own.

Flight modes

The Tello has some nice built in flight modes, you will need to already be up in the air to use most of them. First off you can use throw and go and it will spin up the props and let you throw it to start flying. From there you have fun options like bounce mode and flips, as well as shooting options like circle, up & out and 360. For landings it doesn’t have GPS so no ‘return to home’ but you can either bring it back manually and catch it or go for a palm landing. The landing features are so good it hasn’t touched the ground once to land.

On top of the automated flight features it has a traditional virtual control pad available through the Tello app that will give you all the manual flight controls you need.

Flight Stability

Tello lacks GPS so that does hinder its stability in challenging weather conditions. But the Tello is super light so you wouldn’t expect it to keep stable in strong winds. In the tests we did it held strong in breeze and was very responsive to the controls in all flights we did.

The automated flight features like circle, throw and go and the flips really show you how quickly it can correct itself in the air. The downward vision sensors do a great job keeping it level.

Flight Speed

There is an option to switch Tello up in to ‘Fast’ mode which allows it to go its full speed which is around 17mph (27 kph). Its a surprisingly nippy little drone and a great little starter drone if you are thinking of getting in to something like drone racing. To get the most out of Tello’s speed you will need to remove the prop guards to keep the weight right down.

Flight distance

The Tello has a max flight distance of 100 metres with a restricted flight height of 10 metres. This may sound restrictive but its actually quite generous given how small and light the drone is. Once you go beyond that distance you may start to lose sight or control of the Tello so its not something we really saw as a negative. Using the ‘up and away’ feature makes it feel like it is flying quite far out from you and its enough to get a really nice wide shot.

Camera

The Tello camera has an 82.6″ field of view and works using EIS (electronic image stabilisation) rather than a gimbal to stabilise its shots. Tello shoots 5 megapixel photos, thats 2592 × 1936 in size. Images are saved in JPG format and saved to the Tello app. In terms of video if offers 720p at 30 frames per second, so thats 1280 × 720 pixels in the MP4 video format. We have been pleasantly surprised with the quality of this and for sharing through social channels the quality is actually quite respectable.

Photo and video is stored directly to your phone so you will need free space on there to be able to use the feature. The camera can suffer from some freezing and artefacts in the image. But you have to remember that the images and video are being transferred straight to the device over wifi. We used Google Cloud to backup the content and then just delete it from the phone to keep space freed up.

Tello Drone Test Shots