Remember the movie The Wizard (1989), when Lucas shows off his Nintendo Power Glove and says, "I love the Power Glove. It's so bad." English is weird; "Bad" meant good in the late 1980s. Today, "sick" means really cool. Other today-words that come to mind to review the Hoverair would be "slaps", and "fire," none of which actually sound like a good thing ... where was I going with this?
So, drones are pretty much a dime a dozen these days. A million companies are cranking out cheap toy-like rigs, all trying to outdo each other while DJI pretty much dominates the "not-toy" scene with slick consumer drones like the Mavic, the bite-sized Neo, and big-boy cinematic rigs like the Inspire.
The Hoverair X1 Promax, however, fits neatly into a slightly different niche. It's a fire-and-forget drone that just does drone things. It chases you, leads you, and even flies circles around you. Literally. And all without a controller if you don't want to use one. It'll take off from the palm of your hand and land right back in your hand when the shot is done.
My colleague, Ben, reviewed one a few months back, and when I recently got my hands on it, I wanted to review it as well. Mostly because I have a ton of experience both piloting and as a camera operator on quite a few drones. And let's face it, drones are fun!
He and I both immediately agreed on two things in particular with the Hoverair X1: 1) It's pretty sick. 2) The controller sucks.
Allow me to get into the stats first, then I'll get into my experience with it:
Firstly, it's tiny. Like, really small. It nearly fits entirely within my size XL palm.
- Folded: 4.13 × 5.87 × 1.34 inches (105 × 149 × 34 mm)
- Unfolded: 6.81 × 5.87 × 1.54 inches (173 × 149 × 39 mm)
- Weight: 192.5 g with battery (so no FAA license required!)
So like I said, it's literally pocket-sized (at least in my 5.11 cargo shorts). And considering how small it is, it's capable of chasing you around like you owe it money, at 26 mph (42 km/h) with bursts of speed up to 37 mph (60 km/h), and it shoots a whopping 8K video at 30 fps.
That's 7,680 × 4,320 (16:9 aspect ratio) for you pixel-counters. Enough that your GPU is gonna put in some work while editing footage later.
With its two-axis gimbal and electronic image stabilization ("SmoothCapture 2.0"), it also shoots:
- 4K up to 120 fps, with 10‑bit HLG HDR support
- 1080p up to 120 fps
- Vertical video: 4K up to 30 fps, 2.7K HDR up to 60 fps, 1080p up to 60 fps (HDR available)
Now that we know what it can shoot, you'll want to know how fire it really is.
I was totally skeptical initially. It arrived in two boxes with several boxes perfectly packed inside. All of which seemed far too small to contain a drone. As each little box came out, I found a dual battery charger, a carrying case, the controller/beacon, a charging case, some ND filters, the actual drone, various beacon mounts ... as I unboxed the complete "skiing" kit, it actually became overwhelming. I just wanted to fly. There were so many accessories, most of which are still in their boxes some weeks later.
Mind you, everything was very nicely packaged. I rate packaging on what I call the "Apple Rating: Standard of Excellence," or AR:SE for short – totally made up of course, but no company has finer packaging than Apple. The Hoverair lands a solid 6.5 on the AR:SE. For relative purposes: a Tootsie Roll would be a 1, GoPro a 5, Tiffany & Co. is a 9, and Apple, of course, is an 11. Having well-packaged goods shows the company cares.
After taking a solid 30 minutes to unbox nearly everything while busting out all the charging blocks I had on me at the time to get everything charged up ... and downloading the app, and pairing it to my phone, and updating firmware, annnnnnd ... I finally got my first test flight in – a quick indoor flight test.
Slightly afraid, I put the dronette in follow me mode and launched it from my hand. I then walked around my hotel room for 20 or so seconds. While following me, it looked VERY choppy and wobbly, surging towards me, then abruptly stopping before lurching again – pretty much mimicking how I walk on my pirate leg, so I assumed it was my fault.
After what I thought was a failure of a test, I put my hand out, indicating I wanted it to land. As advertised, it gently landed in my palm with all my fingers still intact.
I opened the app on my phone and downloaded my first test video. The download took around two seconds – so fast I thought something must be wrong, but nope! The drone supports Wi-Fi 6, and it can transfer footage at up to 1.2 Gbps. Lightning! And as wobbly as the drone looked while following my wobbly tuchus, the footage was actually incredibly smooth. I was blown away by not only the stability but the low-light quality of the footage when I viewed it on my phone.
It was a few days later before I put the drone to a proper test. I hopped on my little electric scooter (that I charge with solar power) and went riding around town switching between various flight modes, heights, and distances. Within the first 10 minutes, I decided to read the manual and saw that I could control these parameters directly on the drone. So I ditched the beacon I had ratcheted to my wrist. I skipped the controller entirely, and the beacon itself is just flat-out, um ... cumbersome.
The pros and cons: Without the beacon, the drone has a maximum 1,640-foot (500-m) range. The beacon doubles it at 3,280 ft (1 km) ... but without it, you won't look like a doofus with an oversized, modern-looking Gameboy strapped to your wrist. Granted, they make mounts other than just the wristy, so you could clip it to your backpack or something. The beacon attaches by magnets alone, so it feels somewhat perilous.
The beacon can also record ambient sounds with noise reduction that eliminates the drone's rotor whine. It'll even combine the audio and video tracks so you don't have to mess with it in post. Pretty cool. But not cool enough for me to keep using it.
And the controller? Uh, it's like putting a Jenga puzzle together that clamps your phone into it and connects with a USB-C to whatever-your-phone-is. The three-piece magnetic-plus-tiny-hook-latch controller uses little removable analog thumbsticks like a knock-off Xbox controller. Hard pass.
So then it was just me, the drone, my scooter, and the handy carrying case with the PowerCase neatly tucked inside. Way easier than any other drone I've had the pleasure of tinkering with. Even the nice backpack carrying case for the GoPro Karma wasn't as convenient as the little Hoverair satchel.
The tiny drone deploys in just a few seconds. It takes about three seconds to boot up into the last mode you used, then a 3-2-1 countdown followed by liftoff.
It's that easy. And I like it.
Ditching the controller also means that you can't fly the drone like you'd normally fly one. With the controller, you can fly it off and about to get those cinematic shots if you'd like, but this is more of a narcissistic-folk kinda drone. It's made to showcase YOU and whatever you're doing. Biking, skiing, hiking, scooterin', pirate-legging, whatever. As long as you're not doing it at more than 37 mph (60 km/h), it's got your back.
After tinkering with scooter B-roll, I watched the footage back and immediately laughed out loud because it looked like GTA V gameplay footage. It follows you so perfectly and the footage is so stable that it almost doesn't even look real. I found that I liked "medium distance" and "mid height" level best. Low-level flight put it in danger of hitting things while on the mean streets of the little fishing town I live in.
It has a MicroSD slot in it so you can chuck up to a terabyte of extra memory in it, but surprisingly, it also has 64 GB of onboard storage.
The little X1 Promax has front (via camera), rear (also camera and Time of Flight/ToF sensor), and bottom (ToF) obstacle detection. Let me be clear: detection does not mean AVOIDANCE.
That being said, one of its flight modes is called "dolly," where it'll fly backwards in front of you. And much like when you used to be Thunderbird #1, you are the leader, and it will fly itself into a pole without question just to get the shot.
But unlike an F-18, this thing's got a protective cage built around the rotors. It didn't even crash when I team-leadered it into an obstacle. It did kill the flight mode, however, and slowly RTB'd, awaiting further instructions.
It's just so small and easy to get a quick shot in that I think I actually prefer the Hoverair over more expensive options like the Mavic 3. And I have zero worries of breaking it and being out a bunch of money for a destroyed drone. The only thing that makes the pricier DJI Inspire better for this follow-me-niche is the rotating optics – it can pull off proper parallax shots.
The Hoverair has an accessory called the PowerCase. It's like carrying around an old Beta tape rewinder with how the hatch opens up, and you slide the X1 Promax into it. Honestly, it's one of the coolest drone accessories I've ever seen. It has a 12,500-mAh battery in it that's good for two-and-a-half full drone charges – about an extra 40 minutes of flight time. It's marginally bigger than the drone itself, staying within the "cargo-pocket-sized" dimensions.
I'd fly for a few minutes, chuck it in the PowerCase while I scooter to the next spot, pull out the X1, and it would be fully charged up again, or at least close to. If you have any intention of getting the Hoverair X1 Promax, the Power Case is a must, in my opinion.
Also, I say don't bother with the beacon unless you really need that extra ~1,600 ft range or want to hear yourself narrating what you're doing. With just the app, your phone can record audio as well, but without the noise cancellation and you'll have to manually add the audio track in post.
All in all, I'm super stoked on the Hoverair X1 Promax. It's incredibly capable as a standalone solution for aerial video if you're just looking to capture yourself without needing a drone operator. It's also pretty cool because you don't have to preprogram flight paths and other boring stuff into it. You launch it, then launch yourself into whatever you're doing, and it chugs along nicely on its own.
It's on sale for Prime Day on Amazon right now for US$764 – normally $955 – for the Promax version that has an extra battery and dual charger.
The footage I shot was all in 8K, but trying to cobble together 8K footage on my i7, 16 GB of ram, RTX 3060 laptop ... well, I might need another rig that's a little more robust than this one. So it's in 1080p, but otherwise not altered in any way. No filters to try and make me look pretty, no color correction, no fancy transitions. Just some annoying royalty-free music.
Source: Hoverair
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