Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

TL;DR - The U818A has lots of pros and a couple of cons, but no deal breakers. It's lightweight and sturdy enough to survive crashes. It's a great quadcopter for someone just getting into the hobby with little or no flight experience, but it's also a fun flyer for someone like me who's been flying longer, too. I've been flying quadcopters for about a year now, and I've gotten pretty good at it. I am more into flying sport quads and racers than camera quads or anything with altitude hold. I probably never would have bought a quadcopter like the U818A, but I won one in a contest on a Facebook group so I was interested in testing it out to see what this quad is all about. Build quality and design are both good and what you'd expect to see in a quadcopter in this price range. It's surprisingly light considering how tough and crash-worthy this thing has turned out to be. I wanted to see how tough the body is so I smacked into the house, the ground, a fence and a few trees. It suffered no damage to the body or the well protected props. It comes with 2 700mAh batteries (one is stored in the remote control battery bay) that keep the U818A in the air for 8-10 minutes. I have to say I am not a fan of the way UDI designed the batteries. They used 2 350mAh batteries wrapped together and wired in parallel to come up with the 700mAh rating. The batteries and the U818A have a wonky 4 pin battery connector so you will be forced to use UDI's batteries if you want extras. That also means I can't charge them on my hobby grade charger. The odd battery connector is something that can be simply fixed with a soldering iron, but even still...Boo! Thumbs down on proprietary batteries, UDI! So how does it fly? Amazingly well and very stably as long as there is little wind. I rarely get windless days living on the Massachusetts coast. The U818A is designed to fly on calmer days. The 10 mile an hour offshore breeze I often have here made it a challenge to keep the U818A were I wanted it to stay. It has an adjustable low rate and a high rate and even in high rate the quad was unhappy with my offshore breeze. That big plastic body the U818A has is great at keeping your props safe from crashes, but it also acts as a sail in the wind. It'll fly in the wind, but the less wind the better. On the couple of windless days I was able to fly on, the U818A did everything UDI says it can do. I press the take off/land button and the quad popped up to about 4 feet in the air and sat there waiting for my input. I raised it up to 10 feet and let go of the throttle and the U818A just hung there at that altitude patiently. The quad stayed at whatever altitude I put it even when I gave it pitch or roll and fley it around. Hmm, now I understand why camera quad guys like altitude hold. It makes for a very stable and smooth flyer. If you are a total noob to flying then altitude hold will help you get and keep the quad in the air while you are figuring out how to make it fly it around. When I pressed the land button again,l the quad slowly landed and turned off the motors. If you press and hold the take off/land button when the quad is in the air, the motors stop immediately and the quad falls to earth. That's a good safety function if your quad is about to fly away on you and you just want it to drop. Headless mode also works and it is another good feature for a new flyer to help stay in the air. I am impressed with these features because on so many quads in the price range these feature do not work well or at all. UDI included them and got them all to work right, too. Kudos, UDI! The U818A comes with a removable camera that will record to an SD card (though you have to use an app on your smartphone to turn the camera recording on/off) and also transmit video via WIFI back to your smart phone. The idea is that this will allow you to fly FPV. Unfortunately, it doesn't work all that well for flying FPV because there is some lag between the camera transmitting the video and you seeing it, so while the cam works great for seeing where you are or lining up your video shot for recording, it's not really that awesome for FPV flying. When will these manufacturers figure out that 2.4GHz WIFI is useless for FPV flying? As far as video quality is concerned, you can watch my short review video and judge for yourself. At the end of the day this is a fun quadcopter to fly that is packed with some advanced features that actually work. I plan to use this as a trainer for friends who've never flown a drone but want to give it a try. The alt hold will be great for noobs who want a less frustrating first attempt at flying. Your mom could fly the U818A and I think that is one of the quad's strongest points. The fact that it's easy for someone with little flight time to get this into the air and fly it around. More fun, less frustration :)