Drones have been in the news recently for their military usage, but here’s one that you can fly yourself and get a bird’s eye view of your local neighbourhood at the same time.

The Parrot AR Drone fits somewhere in the middle ground between a high-tech toy and a remote controlled helicopter. It can be controlled by an Android or iOS tablet or smartphone or you can splash out and get the Nvidia Shield portable gaming device, which gives you a more realistic physical analogue control.

The Parrot drone is a plastic construction quadricopter with four plastic rotors. It comes complete with two Styrofoam body shells that simply slip over the chassis frame, an outdoor use shell that leaves the rotors exposed and an indoor shell that wraps around the rotors for extra damage limitation.

It comes complete with two built-in cameras, one forward facing and the other directed downwards. Because of the noise of the rotors, there is no audio capture, and with no onboard storage capabilities, all still or video images are stored directly on to your tablet or smartphone controller. Quality is reasonable, but don’t expect ground-breaking images.

Controlling the drone in flight is reasonably intuitive, especially if using the Nvidia Shield controller, but even just using your smartphone or tablet it doesn’t take too long to get the hang of flight control. On the smartphone, there are two distinct control areas, each capable of four directions. The left area controls elevation and rotation, while the right area takes care of front, back, left or right movements.

The drone is pretty stable in the air and will hover in a small area by itself without user input for a short time, but it would be worth keeping the indoor body shell in place until you’re accustomed to the feel of flying it. An automatic crash shutdown system minimises any damage should you lose control.

Don’t expect to keep your drone flying for more than a few minutes at a time, it is fairly heavy on batteries and in standard format you can expect around ten minutes of flying time from a fully charged battery. It takes around twelve minutes to fully charge a battery, so it would pay to purchase at least one spare. There is also a stunt command that you can use to perform tricks such as flipping the drone or barrel rolls, but this will eat up your battery life. However, once your battery reaches a critically low level, the drone will power itself down and attempt a soft landing.

So if you have money burning a hole in your wallet and want to try something new, this Parrot drone could just be the answer, it’s fun and different!