Parrot Bebop 2 Review – Navigate The Skies, But Keep It In Sight

The Parrot Bebop 2 is the newest personal drone by Parrot, a French company known from the beginnings of the personal drones tech, with the launch of the Parrot AR, back in 2010. It was one of the drone models who opened the way for a new sector of the tech market who wanted to take advantage of the possibilities of doing airborne recordings while avoiding the hassles of carrying around bulky controls, as it was controlled by a smartphone app. A lot has changed since then, and many competitors have joined the race, such as Yuneec and 3DR, let’s see what makes the Parrot Bebop 2 stand out from the crowd.

The Parrot Bebop 2 is advertised as the first leisure drone in the 500g category with 25 minutes of battery life, which is a great improvement from the 11-minute flight time of the previous model, and a non-expandable 8GB of storage space. It is compact enough to be carried around in a backpack and has a reinforced structure to avoid significant damages if it accidentally hits a structure while it is flying. It comes with a 14-megapixels camera with a fisheye lens and 3-axis image stabilization for fair enough quality videos. It can do 1080p video recordings, but the lens used improves view range at the expense of a bit of image detail. It may not be a deal breaker for home use, as it is way better than cheaper personal drones in the market, but is an opportunity lost for Parrot to bring some improvements from the previous Bebop model, which had the same megapixel count onboard.

It has two ways to be controlled: one involves a free app for Android/iOS devices (add $20 with the Flight Plan add-on) and with the Skycontroller, an all-in-one control that lets you control your personal drone and stream what the camera captures. Key differences between both kinds of controllers are general reliability while flying and connectivity range. In both scenarios, you create an ad-hoc connection between your controller and the Parrot Bebop 2. This connection can be made in two different Wi-Fi bands: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz, or a combination of both of them.

Parrot promises signal connectivity up to 300m to your smartphone in barrier-free environments or without network disruption, and up to 2km with the dedicated Skycontroller. That is, you may have a hard time reaching that distance on an urban location depending on the band you’re using. This happens because network disruption means that the amount of users in the frequency range of the Wi-Fi band you’re in is too high, as most routers and home Wi-Fi connections rely on the 2.4 GHz band as it is more widely used. Using this band to operate the Parrot Bebop 2 may cause choppiness and unreliability while trying to operate the device on urban areas, as interference becomes a bigger issue when the signal becomes weaker.

In our tests for both controllers, we found that the 5GHz band is more reliable for general usage, so use it with the Parrot Bebop 2 if possible, as there’s fewer devices operating in that frequency band. Otherwise, avoid sending your personal drone to distances farther than 100m unless you’re using the flight mode, which covers up the inconveniences for most common purposes. You can select the route on your screen and tell the Parrot Bebop 2 what to do and what to record. Be mindful of the overall flight time, as our tests have shown that while the Parrot Bebop 2 is smart enough to come back to its takeoff place if it has been disconnected from your controller for more than a minute. It doesn’t do the same for the Flight Plan. It will flight where you ask it to go and if battery’s not up to the trip, you won’t know until you see it losing height faster than what you’d like to see. We found the battery life to be accurate to what was promised in the description, so you can rely on it when making a flight plan for your Parrot Bebop 2.

Once set up, the Parrot Bebop 2 behaved well on our tests, flying smoothly while we were near it with our smartphone (50-100m) with a clear video stream, which started to show up a little bit of choppiness on video as we started to push the distance barrier further, around 200m. We started to have connectivity problems after 200m, so you may want to avoid sending it too far from your sight unless it’s easy to get to near where it is flying. With the Skycontroller we were able to keep a stable stream up to 650m, after that we started getting choppiness on video, and connectivity problems began to happen around a kilometer distance, but that may have been due to interference from structures in between, which may have had an impact on the expected connection range. Regarding flight plans, the Parrot Bebop 2 landed a few meters off the place we marked as a landing point, which may be due to the precision of the GPS onboard, something we would like to see improved in a future model of the Bebop line.

From our tests, we may conclude that the Parrot Bebop 2 is a good personal drone for users who are willing to invest a little more to get a better lasting product, but it has many things to work on if it wants to compete with other products in higher pricing tiers. Specifications such as the non-expandable storage space, which makes It hard to use the 1080p recording quality for extended sessions without saving the videos to your computer/smartphone, as well the camera, which can win some points if it improves its megapixel count and the image quality. We also concluded that the Skycontroller was far more reliable than the smartphone controller for general use, but considering the investment it represents, you may prefer to look around for other products in the price range for a more full-featured option. If you’re willing to do the investment, other drones in the price range are likely to include a dedicated controller as well.

Visit Parrot official site or Amazon sales page