Syma X11 R/C Quadcopter - Red

Easy to fly, very very stable, strong, great range and just flat fun! It is just the right size to fly in my front yard and I even flown it off the sand dunes at lake Michigan with no issue. I thought I would need to take off the prop guard but never have since it has great performance with it on. The first one I owned I flew well over 100+ times before a front motor went out and it still has the original props. I liked it so much I just had to order a second since I could not wait for a replacement motor. Cons: advanced flyers will not like the fact it stops on a dime when you release the stick but it is a huge advantage in close quarters. Batteries that fit well are a little hard to find and I expect over time the battery wire will break but mine hasn't.

Again... SYMA! Their products are some of the best. This little buzzer is a good little toy... and a good transition trainer to quads. I've been flying helicopters... I've tried several different makers and have pretty much settled on SYMA for helicopters. But I wanted to move to quad copters... so I bought a SYMA X8C Quad Copter. I have reviewed that product here on Amazon and wasn't so happy with it. It sustained damage too easily, I thought. I've crashed the helicopters numerous times and they've proven resilient. But the X8C broke after only five or six flights. But maybe now I think I should have started flying quads with something smaller and simpler... like the X11... then moved up. The X11 came with a blade guard not shown in the illustration. The blade guard is a major plus. You will need fewer replacement blades. one negative-- The connector set... male/female, battery to copter... is delicate and tiny. I can see how easily it would be to damage the wiring and solder joints when connecting/disconnecting, as you must do each and every time you recharge the battery. You must remove the battery to charge it. Forgo the temptation to leave the battery in the body of the copter while recharging. This is not a smart move when charging LiPo's. They are subject to overheating and catching fire or exploding if they are not charged properly. Read and inform yourself about Lithium-polymer batteries and heed all warnings. When charging take the battery out each time and place the battery on a non-flammable surface... I use an old dinner plate.... just be very careful to avoid pulling the wires from the solder joints or the connector. Positive-- The X11 is an exceptional flier. It's fast and responsive and can fly outdoors in light wind. So far I have not exceeded the range on the controller. That will probably happen, but the range seems to be more than enough for my purposes. I have been focusing on training myself to control a quad. It's a different animal than a helicopter. So I don't know much about the aerobatics yet. I'll update as I learn more. Bottom line so far-- I recommend the SYMA X11 R/C Quadcopter. UPDATE-- Two more flights... indoors and outdoors...no issues. Fights the wind and wins. Liking this thing!

I bought this because a lot of video reviews said it was the best Hubsan X4 clone, and I have another Syma product that I like a lot. My impression is that it is a nice flier, but as is, has major range issues. Indoors it's a great flier, but outdoors as is , the range is only 25-30 feet. The problem I found was the placement of the antenna in the Quad, which is stuffed into one of the arms. I drilled a hole in the top of the quad and directed it straight up and outside. I also positioned the controller antenna outside as well. With these modifications it's range is now greater than 100 feet, which allows outside flying. As I said it's a nice flier, but not the best Hubsan X4 clone. pros: Great battery life, seams well made, and is a quiet and precise indoor flier. Cons: The range issue and it suffers from Vortex ring state worse than any quad I have.

I really wanted to like this copter, because there's a lot to like here, but there's some really bad stuff too and the bad stuff wins out. First, the good stuff. This thing is just unbelievably fun to fly. I bought two for my boys and they flew them both at the same time with no problem. This thing is easy to fly, but has lots of potential as your skill grows. It's great to fly inside, but it also flies great outside when there is little to no wind. The range is so long you can almost fly it out of site, and then bring it back. When it flies it's absolutely awesome, but that brings us to the bad stuff. The bad staff: The directions are a joke, with really, really bad translation. Ours claimed to have a camera (it didn't) and nothing else really made any sense at all. That's not too bad, it's super easy to figure out how to use it and you can find any details you need online pretty easily. What's really bad about this little flying marvel is the build quality. It's awful. The way the battery is attached and detached for charging is just idiotic. The first time I looked at it I thought, "this thing is going to break" and 5 charges later, it did. In fact, before either copter had flown through 10 recharge cycles we had to take them all apart and replace broken wiring several times. My father in law had the tools and technical knowledge to do this. If you're not up on wiring and electronic repair and have several gauges of replacement wire laying around you won't be able to do the same thing, Again, this was true of both copters we bought. They both had the same problems. We were extremely careful when we charged them and the wires still broke, the design just invites that kind of damage to happen. Once we rewired them we got about 10-15 more recharge cycles out of them before other stuff started breaking that we couldn't fix. This included the frames breaking on both of them (we super glued them a couple times to keep them running) and eventually the killer was that a rotor engine stopped working on each of them, While they were crashed a few times I would say that we took better care of them than most would have, and they didn't have unusually bad treatment of any kind. All in all we got about three weeks of use out of the copter, with major repairs required throughout that time, before they became irreparable. Absolutely total fun to fly, but it's hard to justify recommending buying because of the quality issues.