Parrot Bebop 2 Power drone offers an hour of flying time - with a catch

Parrot, one of the industry leading drone manufacturers, has released an upgraded version of its (already very decent) Bebop 2 drone. The Bebop 2 Power has had a significant overhaul of its software and hardware, but the main selling point, as the name would probably suggest, is the power its batteries can hold.

The Bebop 2 Power claims to have an hour’s worth of fly time. In the world of commercially available drones this is miles ahead of the competition, but it does come with a catch: it’s not one hour of uninterrupted flight.

A single battery will last for half an hour, and you get two batteries in the pack, so you can fly for an entire hour by changing the battery over mid-session. While that might feel like a bit of a cheat, it does mean you get more time in the air.

To be fair, half an hour is already a fairly impressive flight time, as most of the drones on our best drones list wouldn’t manage to stay airborne that long, but the addition of a second battery means you can now spend double the time capturing beautiful Full HD footage.

And the footage that the Bebop Power 2 can capture does look stunning. Upgrades to its machine learning technology means that you can take beautifully smooth and stable video. With smartphone controls, a simple tap of the screen lets you choose the focus of the image, then select from a range of different video modes, create swooping cinematic videos.

It's all in the box

There are some new additions to the shooting modes too, including 'Tornado', that will rotate around you for that Michael Bay ‘spinning around the protagonist’ shot that you never knew you needed, and 'Rise', that will allow you to recreate the opening of Prometheus in your garden.

If shooting video isn’t your thing, and you’d like to open the gears up a little, the Power has a Sport Mode that lets you reach speeds of 65km/h and get some satisfying tilt during turns. For the thrill seeker that wants to see what the drone sees, the Bebop Power 2 also comes with Parrot’s FPV headset which gives you a first person view from the drone.

The FPV headset works by strapping your smartphone into it, and then you use the Parrot Skycontroller 2 to fly the Bebop 2 Power. What is a nice change is that all of these different elements all come in the package. One of the previous criticisms of the Bebop range is that all of the different add-ons came at an additional cost, making it a fairly expensive proposition once they were all included.

The full bundle, containing the drone, two batteries, the Parrot Skycontroller 2 and the FPV headset is available now for £629 ($599.99, Australian prices to be confirmed).