Here's PART 1 of our Dobby review, also be sure to checkout Part 2 (th-cam.com/video/WdZYRkeF7zw/w-d-xo.html) and for more details and to find the cheapest price for Dobby, click here (bit.ly/2u8iLZ5).
laila Al-Brunawi Dobby is far cheaper but lesser quality video and no mechanical gimbal, therefore it really depends on what you want to spend. If you have enough for a Spark, buy the Spark! www.droningon.co/dji-spark
Great Review (again) Ash. As you know, I'm a huge fan of the Dobby and I completely agree with your summary. A couple of additional points worth mentioning are (a) the Dobby operates on both the 2.4 and 5ghz wifi bands although not all phones can connect at 5ghz (my Samsung won't). However, unlike the Spark the Dobby does at least default to 2.4ghz. The Spark defaults to 5ghz which means that I have to manually reset the band every time I switch on which is, frankly, dumb! (b) You can both fast charge the battery by plugging the charger into the provided wall plug or slow charge by plugging it into a computer or usb power bank. This is very useful when going out for the day. Looking forward to your Part 2 (but I'm already sold on it lol).
Thanks for taking your time to review the Dobby! I saw an advertisement for it last year when I first started in the hobby, and not much since then... It still looks interesting!
Another great video Ash, really enjoy your style and pace of delivery, you cover things extremely well. Looking forward to part 2 of the drone that I never thought would last as long as this.
+Andy Kiy thanks very much for the feedback! I'm filming part 2 tomorrow, I hope to have it online shortly :) love your support, help me by sharing my videos to your various groups.
I bought a couple of these late last year. A very good antidote to the Onagofly. The Onagofly is very far from fulfilling its promise but I still have a soft spot for it. Unlike the Onagofly this does everything that I hoped. There have been some small upgrades and aftermarket bits since I got mine and plenty of App and firmware updates that offer continual improvements in functions and reliability. I can not emphasize how important it is with these drones to follow the instructions and regularly calibrate the compass if you move away from where it was first set. Avoid buildings and power lines and areas that may have strong wifi interference. But they do fly well indoors thanks to the ultrasonics and optical flow. Don't fly low over still water as the ground sensing can get confused! I have occasionally had a barometer error preventing take off. A quick on and off seems to fix that! Also when flying any drone don't be a dick! With these drones, I notice that yours now has the later slightly wider and more rounded tip props. These do make it a little quieter. I can't say that I have noticed much if any significant change in performance because of them. It may be that when you accidentally use Dobby as a fingernail trimmer the finger is slightly less lacerated! I fly using IOS on my 6s+ and on my iPod Mini cellular. On the Mini, the DoFun app works just fine but it loses its avatar so It displays as a generic app. I guess not rewritten for the iPad. It still fills about 85% of the screen. As I said I bought two. One from TomTop at a very good price then of about £260 and one from Banggood but that was £308. I can't remember why I chose Banggood for the second. It may have been a lack of availability at TT at the time I can't remember. I did get a refund from PayPal from TT as the first order hung in processing. and then about three days later the Dobby arrived! Naturally, I refunded the refund back to TT. I noticed later that I refunded about £30 too much! A point worth noting is that the TomTop Dobby came via the Royal Mail. They did not ask for any duty payment. The Bangood one came via FedEx and I had to stump up, I think about, £30 duty! It seems the Royal Mail can be quite random with duty collection but Fedex are stricter! I have also purchased other spares batteries and cases from Banggood. Also, some aluminum propeller mountings from Alibaba as the original Zerotech ones have a habit of cracking. Ironically I recently purchased an Alpha Egg drone from TT and that also hung on the processing so I did another nondelivery with PayPal and that was refunded. In typical fashion the Alpha Egg arrived a few days later! This time to balance things out I am hanging on to the refund. I bought another Alfa Egg from RCmoment.com that was priced about £10 cheaper. I then discovered chatting with their Customer service via Facebook that in fact, they are a part of TomTop and TomTop is what appears on the PayPal statement. Just to add further I have dealt with many of the Chinese gadget shops online. There has been the occasional hiccup but although they all vary in the ease of contacting customer service I have always had good resolution with all of them. My only minor irritation is that sometimes things arrive weeks after the initial order especially if a free post is used. No rel problem with that. It is just that it is rare to find any paperwork that gives me a clue who I bought the stuff from! Sorry to drone on and on about all this but your site is appropriately named :-) Steve Lane
+Steve Lane, great feedback and you must be a real fan to have bought two initially :) keep watching, Part 2 and Part 3 will be here soon, watch this space!
Excellent review! I'm in the market for my first drone and trying to find a balance between quality/capability and affordability. This one is looking pretty promising, but if you have any other good suggestions for that balance I'm looking for, I'd love know so I can weigh the pros and cons of more than just one.
It depends on what you want to do with it. If what you are looking for is, essentially, an aerial extension to your phone camera then the Dobby is a good/great addition. If you want something to have fun with whizzing around the sky then the Dobby is not so good because it doesn't have a controller.
I just got one from OneDigitals for £165.00 and so far it does exactly what it says on the box, don’t be put off using OneDigitals They have had some problems with delivery but they are trying to improve ,they appear to be a UK company but they actually operate out of HK.I just ordered some batteries from GearBest for £23.50 each including postage.
Ash. I imagine that by now you have discovered that the sound output at the rear is rather poor quality. I suspect that is because it is in fact a cooling fan vent ;-)
It's rather not a "budget quad" per se (I mean, it is NOT pricey, but considering the cons and general age a couple of bucks cheaper should be more appropiate) but I guess it's "ok"? Care to please, if not edited yet, add a couple of selfies (I refuse to say dronie :P) with you and/or a group under different sircumstances like a dining party at home, grill day at the park, good bye gathering in a bus station and so on to showcase the potential of the drone for what's made for? I mean, you won't fil or shoot scenery pics with this one, or do cinematography or racing... Keep up the good work, I like the way you do the reviews, nice and consistent! Cheers from Barcelona!
Gracias +el_marto for your comments! I do wonder if the Dobby will drop a little in price soon as it isn't quite budget as you say, but it is cheap compared to what else is out there in the market. I'll definitely be dropping lots of dronies, selfies, photos and video into Part 3, I assure you :) Part 2 will focus on the app as it is ever evolving and just the release from yesterday introduced some nice new features! I intend on following the progress of the app too so that I can release update videos at a later stage. Glad that you're liking the format, thanks again for following and be sure to share this video :)
Thank you for the reply, will watch it for sure as I'm looking for a nice small selfie drone for underway; I have a Mavic but deploying it in Barcelona City will grant me a fine high as... well, you catch my drift ;) Cheers!
+The Basicbill Channel absolutely, it's in edit now parallel to a few other videos, I'm on quite a roll this week :) watch this space and hit SUBSCRIBE to be notified when?
Nice review. Funny they ad an usb-c cable but then have the slot for standard usb in the drone itself. 350$ is a bit on the expensive side imo and gets it to close to the likes of the bebop 2 or the Xplorer Mini, wich seem more capable, at least for video. Unless you absolutely need something that fits in a pocket, wich I doubt. Maybe if it was 250$...Anyway looking forward to part 2. Cheers.
+João Gonçalves yes but at least it shows continual development as the charger dies use the USB-C connector. I suspect that Dobby might drop a little in price, but many do want a pocket drone, I couldn't carry around the Xiro or Bebop 2 in the places that I have recently visited with Dobby, particularly now that I have a baby and limited free space...and hands :)
the usb-c connector is for connecting your PC (or fairly up-to-date smartphone) so you can download from the SD-card and I think Dobby needs to be turned on to do so.
Marbletrain60 ah ha...well because if you're out and about, you'll want to fly for more than one battery's worth, so buy more to ensure that you've got plenty of flying time. They're rechargeable of course...but it takes an hour to recharge.
+Franklin Hennessey, realistically Dobby is the lowest cost decent drone that you can buy at this time, there really isn't anything else which performs as Dobby does at this price. |---- TomTop: bit.ly/2u8iLZ5 |---- BangGood: goo.gl/AzfrlJ |---- GearBest: goo.gl/PXNwE7 |---- HobbyWow: bit.ly/2vbwL1n
Very beautiful and easy to use and load, but it has no translation Please ask the company or a user to create a video that shows how to use the Arabic language
DroningON.co so what i mean is dobby is basically 1080p cuz of electronic image stabilization. so is spark but spark has a two axis gimbal for smoother footages or vids. spark can just pop right out of ur bag, dont need a phone or controller and jusy hand gesture to place and boom take photo. dobby on the other hand, take out drone, wifi connect, go to app, bla bla bla. sometimesin dobbys vids there are black parts of the screen jutting out of nowhere! im not trying to be rude, just silently disagreeing with you. you can earn 100 more bucks for a gimbal, hand gesture, safely rth with obst avoid, smooth 1080p! thats worth saving up! just my opinion...
+Mr Rain, thanks for the feedback and for explaining - but the DJI Spark is twice the price, its image quality isn't amazing (see Philip Bloom's latest review). Yes it has a mechanical gimbal but you're paying twice as much, thats why. The black bars on the Dobby will appear due to the EIS (Electronic Image Stabilisation) and that should only occur during rapid direction movements OR on a windy day. As for getting Dobby into the air, I can launch it in less than one minute, its very quick and the Spark 'Gesture' control actually doesn't seem to be very popular nor successful. Wait for my next few videos, I'll put it properly through its paces, have you got a Dobby? I personally wouldn't buy a Spark, not from what I have seen of it so far.
DroningON.co wait a minute! the gesture isnt successful?? it doesnt work correctly? hey, allthe vid ive been watching were scams! they were paid by dji!!
+Brad Hubbard, thanks for your comments, positive or negative it is really good to hear from my viewers. I am surprised however as I have now been flying my Dobby for a month and have not experienced a single issue, I am frustrated that it doesn't capture 4K video and that the tiltable camera isn't motor controlled, but besides that its quite to deploy and is great fun! Have you contacted ZeroTech to get a replacement, as perhaps you have a dud?
Sure there are bugs in new releases and they are annoying although they are almost (if not entirely) to do with the Android platform. Iphones never seem to have any problems. However, there are bugs and there are bugs. Some bugs just lessen the user experience a bit, other bugs can crash the system and stop you flying. There have been no bugs in any release that have stopped me flying. And if I've been unhappy with an update I've just rolled back to an earlier one. My DJI Spark app has plenty of bugs as well but no updates to fix them.
![Dobby - Smart Pocket Drone In-Depth Review [4K]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/hSAzxCv1hKw/mqdefault.jpg)
Here's PART 1 of our Dobby review, also be sure to checkout Part 2 (th-cam.com/video/WdZYRkeF7zw/w-d-xo.html) and for more details and to find the cheapest price for Dobby, click here (bit.ly/2u8iLZ5).
DroningON so which is better for u? dobby or spark. please answer
laila Al-Brunawi Dobby is far cheaper but lesser quality video and no mechanical gimbal, therefore it really depends on what you want to spend. If you have enough for a Spark, buy the Spark! www.droningon.co/dji-spark
DroningON so spark is more better.
btw thank you for ur faster respond..😊❤
Great Review (again) Ash. As you know, I'm a huge fan of the Dobby and I completely agree with your summary.
A couple of additional points worth mentioning are (a) the Dobby operates on both the 2.4 and 5ghz wifi bands although not all phones can connect at 5ghz (my Samsung won't). However, unlike the Spark the Dobby does at least default to 2.4ghz. The Spark defaults to 5ghz which means that I have to manually reset the band every time I switch on which is, frankly, dumb! (b) You can both fast charge the battery by plugging the charger into the provided wall plug or slow charge by plugging it into a computer or usb power bank. This is very useful when going out for the day.
Looking forward to your Part 2 (but I'm already sold on it lol).
+Doug Conran thanks dude, great feedback as always and useful tips.
Thanks for taking your time to review the Dobby! I saw an advertisement for it last year when I first started in the hobby, and not much since then... It still looks interesting!
My pleasure +R L, look out for the next few parts!
Another great video Ash, really enjoy your style and pace of delivery, you cover things extremely well. Looking forward to part 2 of the drone that I never thought would last as long as this.
+Andy Kiy thanks very much for the feedback! I'm filming part 2 tomorrow, I hope to have it online shortly :) love your support, help me by sharing my videos to your various groups.
+Andy Kiy, thanks so much for your comments! Part 2 coming very soon!
I bought a couple of these late last year. A very good antidote to the Onagofly. The Onagofly is very far from fulfilling its promise but I still have a soft spot for it. Unlike the Onagofly this does everything that I hoped. There have been some small upgrades and aftermarket bits since I got mine and plenty of App and firmware updates that offer continual improvements in functions and reliability. I can not emphasize how important it is with these drones to follow the instructions and regularly calibrate the compass if you move away from where it was first set. Avoid buildings and power lines and areas that may have strong wifi interference. But they do fly well indoors thanks to the ultrasonics and optical flow. Don't fly low over still water as the ground sensing can get confused! I have occasionally had a barometer error preventing take off. A quick on and off seems to fix that!
Also when flying any drone don't be a dick!
With these drones, I notice that yours now has the later slightly wider and more rounded tip props. These do make it a little quieter. I can't say that I have noticed much if any significant change in performance because of them. It may be that when you accidentally use Dobby as a fingernail trimmer the finger is slightly less lacerated! I fly using IOS on my 6s+ and on my iPod Mini cellular. On the Mini, the DoFun app works just fine but it loses its avatar so It displays as a generic app. I guess not rewritten for the iPad. It still fills about 85% of the screen. As I said I bought two. One from TomTop at a very good price then of about £260 and one from Banggood but that was £308. I can't remember why I chose Banggood for the second. It may have been a lack of availability at TT at the time I can't remember. I did get a refund from PayPal from TT as the first order hung in processing. and then about three days later the Dobby arrived! Naturally, I refunded the refund back to TT. I noticed later that I refunded about £30 too much!
A point worth noting is that the TomTop Dobby came via the Royal Mail. They did not ask for any duty payment.
The Bangood one came via FedEx and I had to stump up, I think about, £30 duty! It seems the Royal Mail can be quite random with duty collection but Fedex are stricter!
I have also purchased other spares batteries and cases from Banggood. Also, some aluminum propeller mountings from Alibaba as the original Zerotech ones have a habit of cracking.
Ironically I recently purchased an Alpha Egg drone from TT and that also hung on the processing so I did another nondelivery with PayPal and that was refunded. In typical fashion the Alpha Egg arrived a few days later! This time to balance things out I am hanging on to the refund. I bought another Alfa Egg from RCmoment.com that was priced about £10 cheaper. I then discovered chatting with their Customer service via Facebook that in fact, they are a part of TomTop and TomTop is what appears on the PayPal statement.
Just to add further I have dealt with many of the Chinese gadget shops online. There has been the occasional hiccup but although they all vary in the ease of contacting customer service I have always had good resolution with all of them.
My only minor irritation is that sometimes things arrive weeks after the initial order especially if a free post is used. No rel problem with that. It is just that it is rare to find any paperwork that gives me a clue who I bought the stuff from!
Sorry to drone on and on about all this but your site is appropriately named :-)
Steve Lane
+Steve Lane, great feedback and you must be a real fan to have bought two initially :) keep watching, Part 2 and Part 3 will be here soon, watch this space!
Excellent review! I'm in the market for my first drone and trying to find a balance between quality/capability and affordability. This one is looking pretty promising, but if you have any other good suggestions for that balance I'm looking for, I'd love know so I can weigh the pros and cons of more than just one.
+Techtonik097 thanks for the feedback! Look out for part 2 and 3 coming very soon!
It depends on what you want to do with it. If what you are looking for is, essentially, an aerial extension to your phone camera then the Dobby is a good/great addition. If you want something to have fun with whizzing around the sky then the Dobby is not so good because it doesn't have a controller.
Really like everyone of your videos.Keep up the great work.
Thanks so much, great to hear and be sure to subscribe!
I just got one from OneDigitals for £165.00 and so far it does exactly what it says on the box, don’t be put off using OneDigitals
They have had some problems with delivery but they are trying to improve ,they appear to be a UK company but they actually operate out of HK.I just ordered some batteries from GearBest for £23.50 each including postage.
Nice video Ash, looking forward to the next instalment,
Thanks +Dale Mumford!
Ash. I imagine that by now you have discovered that the sound output at the rear is rather poor quality. I suspect that is because it is in fact a cooling fan vent ;-)
Haha, I realised that after the first flight :P
It's rather not a "budget quad" per se (I mean, it is NOT pricey, but considering the cons and general age a couple of bucks cheaper should be more appropiate) but I guess it's "ok"? Care to please, if not edited yet, add a couple of selfies (I refuse to say dronie :P) with you and/or a group under different sircumstances like a dining party at home, grill day at the park, good bye gathering in a bus station and so on to showcase the potential of the drone for what's made for? I mean, you won't fil or shoot scenery pics with this one, or do cinematography or racing...
Keep up the good work, I like the way you do the reviews, nice and consistent!
Cheers from Barcelona!
Gracias +el_marto for your comments! I do wonder if the Dobby will drop a little in price soon as it isn't quite budget as you say, but it is cheap compared to what else is out there in the market. I'll definitely be dropping lots of dronies, selfies, photos and video into Part 3, I assure you :) Part 2 will focus on the app as it is ever evolving and just the release from yesterday introduced some nice new features! I intend on following the progress of the app too so that I can release update videos at a later stage. Glad that you're liking the format, thanks again for following and be sure to share this video :)
Thank you for the reply, will watch it for sure as I'm looking for a nice small selfie drone for underway; I have a Mavic but deploying it in Barcelona City will grant me a fine high as... well, you catch my drift ;) Cheers!
Nice. Part 2 soon?
+The Basicbill Channel absolutely, it's in edit now parallel to a few other videos, I'm on quite a roll this week :) watch this space and hit SUBSCRIBE to be notified when?
+The Basicbill Channel, did you find Part 2 in the end?
Nice review. Funny they ad an usb-c cable but then have the slot for standard usb in the drone itself. 350$ is a bit on the expensive side imo and gets it to close to the likes of the bebop 2 or the Xplorer Mini, wich seem more capable, at least for video. Unless you absolutely need something that fits in a pocket, wich I doubt. Maybe if it was 250$...Anyway looking forward to part 2. Cheers.
+João Gonçalves yes but at least it shows continual development as the charger dies use the USB-C connector. I suspect that Dobby might drop a little in price, but many do want a pocket drone, I couldn't carry around the Xiro or Bebop 2 in the places that I have recently visited with Dobby, particularly now that I have a baby and limited free space...and hands :)
the usb-c connector is for connecting your PC (or fairly up-to-date smartphone) so you can download from the SD-card and I think Dobby needs to be turned on to do so.
Waiting the 2nd part,! Thanks!
+Elmi vick perez coming soon, I promise!
Part 2 is already live :)
Extraordinary job! thanks a lot!
+Elmi vick perez thanks for the feedback!
Im confused, why do you need to buy a new battery if you have a charger?
Marbletrain60 what do you mean? Could you point me to the part of the review that has caused confusion?
9:00
Marbletrain60 ah ha...well because if you're out and about, you'll want to fly for more than one battery's worth, so buy more to ensure that you've got plenty of flying time. They're rechargeable of course...but it takes an hour to recharge.
Actually because the battery life completely sucks....flight time is at most 6 min.... extended battery is about 70 bucks
i would like to know what drone will be the cheapest selfie drone? and people from 3rd world countries can afford.
+Franklin Hennessey, realistically Dobby is the lowest cost decent drone that you can buy at this time, there really isn't anything else which performs as Dobby does at this price.
|---- TomTop: bit.ly/2u8iLZ5
|---- BangGood: goo.gl/AzfrlJ
|---- GearBest: goo.gl/PXNwE7
|---- HobbyWow: bit.ly/2vbwL1n
Where is part 2
+Pavle Spasić it's coming soon!
Sorry again for the delay, I have been on holiday but I'm editing Part 2 as I type :) coming very soon now!
Did you see Part 2?
Very beautiful and easy to use and load, but it has no translation
Please ask the company or a user to create a video that shows how to use the Arabic language
Unfortunately Dobby doesn't seem to be evolving as quickly as before, therefore a translation may be difficult.
loved video
Nice I like it
obviously you can earn only a couple of more bucks for spark....
+Mr Rain can you explain what you mean?
DroningON.co
so what i mean is dobby is basically 1080p cuz of electronic image stabilization. so is spark but spark has a two axis gimbal for smoother footages or vids. spark can just pop right out of ur bag, dont need a phone or controller and jusy hand gesture to place and boom take photo. dobby on the other hand, take out drone, wifi connect, go to app, bla bla bla. sometimesin dobbys vids there are black parts of the screen jutting out of nowhere! im not trying to be rude, just silently disagreeing with you. you can earn 100 more bucks for a gimbal, hand gesture, safely rth with obst avoid, smooth 1080p! thats worth saving up! just my opinion...
+Mr Rain, thanks for the feedback and for explaining - but the DJI Spark is twice the price, its image quality isn't amazing (see Philip Bloom's latest review). Yes it has a mechanical gimbal but you're paying twice as much, thats why. The black bars on the Dobby will appear due to the EIS (Electronic Image Stabilisation) and that should only occur during rapid direction movements OR on a windy day. As for getting Dobby into the air, I can launch it in less than one minute, its very quick and the Spark 'Gesture' control actually doesn't seem to be very popular nor successful. Wait for my next few videos, I'll put it properly through its paces, have you got a Dobby? I personally wouldn't buy a Spark, not from what I have seen of it so far.
DroningON.co
wait a minute! the gesture isnt successful?? it doesnt work correctly? hey, allthe vid ive been watching were scams! they were paid by dji!!
+Mr Rain, yes quite a few videos show the gesture control to be pretty flakey, it definitely needs additional development.
worst drone I have.. bugs,bugs, bugs with every software release. extremely disappointed in this drone.
+Brad Hubbard, thanks for your comments, positive or negative it is really good to hear from my viewers. I am surprised however as I have now been flying my Dobby for a month and have not experienced a single issue, I am frustrated that it doesn't capture 4K video and that the tiltable camera isn't motor controlled, but besides that its quite to deploy and is great fun! Have you contacted ZeroTech to get a replacement, as perhaps you have a dud?
Sure there are bugs in new releases and they are annoying although they are almost (if not entirely) to do with the Android platform. Iphones never seem to have any problems.
However, there are bugs and there are bugs. Some bugs just lessen the user experience a bit, other bugs can crash the system and stop you flying. There have been no bugs in any release that have stopped me flying. And if I've been unhappy with an update I've just rolled back to an earlier one.
My DJI Spark app has plenty of bugs as well but no updates to fix them.