Whether you’re a kid stuck at home on a snow day or a kid stuck at the office on a workday, toys rock. And kids of all ages know the coolest toys are remote controlled, letting you fly or drive away a dull afternoon from your couch or cubicle. If anything can beat that, it’s toys that you can control wirelessly with your iPhone or iPad.
That’s just what the four toys we played with—er, methodically tested--let you do. Each has a rechargeable battery and requires you to download and install a free app on your device to control the toy, beaming commands over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or radio waves. But that’s where the similarities end. The Speed King promises traditional RC car races and spinouts. Sphero is part toy, part virtual pet. The Helo TC Assault chopper lets you take to the unfriendly skies armed with missiles that really fire. The AR.Drone 2.0 packs an HD video camera and can fly to dizzying heights to patrol your home, office, or neighborhood. Which one rules the high-tech toy chest?
The Speed King will satisfy your need for speed, but don’t expect much else. It looks and feels like what it is: a lightweight, four-inch-long motor with springy wheels and a flimsy race car shell attached with velcro. We expect it’ll spend a lot of time in your desk drawer or garage.
Controlled by radio waves, the Speed King comes with an adapter that plugs in to your iPhone’s headphone jack and a cord to charge both over USB. Reading the badly translated instructions somehow makes these steps confusing, and we had to wiggle the cord into the car just right to get a constant charge, both of which was about as much fun as a pit stop.
But with the adapter in place on your device, the Speed King controls just fine at impressive ranges, though handling an iPhone with the transmitter attached is far from comfortable. You accelerate or reverse with a slider and can steer with a virtual thumbstick, or if you like to crash, with your iPhone’s accelerometer. You can choose from one of three radio channels to control your car, allowing you to drive multiple Speed Kings in the same area without conflicting signals, something we couldn’t test.
Out on the open road, the Speed King zips around at basically two speeds, slow or very fast, but its motor emits a loud whine at reduced RPMs, making careful maneuvering annoying (at faster speeds, the motor is merely noisy). But the Speed King’s featherweight, just-sturdy-enough build excels at fast maneuvers and stunts like catching air off ramps or coffee tables. With the included roll bar—a high-tech loop of plastic that attaches to the car with adhesive tape--the Speed King can spin, roll, and otherwise bounce back from just about any wipeout you can devise, for as long as the battery lasts. We got roughly 15 minutes of racing on a charge, average for the devices in our roundup. But since the car and transmitter have different charge times and capacities--and indicate their battery status only when plugged in--keeping them both charged and ready to go took too much guesswork.
With a combination of geek-friendly tech, simplicity, and fun, Sphero puts a new spin on remote controlled toys--literally. Don’t be fooled by the plain exterior--Sphero’s 3-inch polycarbonate shell packs an accelerometer, gyroscope, and the pleasingly quiet motors that keep it on the move. You can even change Sphero’s appearance, thanks to internal colored LEDs that blend to create millions of glowing colors. And since Sphero is sealed, it’s waterproof to 15 feet. The Mac|Life company pool was closed for cleaning at press time, but we can confirm that Sphero splashes around just fine in the sink. It even floats!
Sphero pairs with your iOS device over Bluetooth, so connecting is a snap, and you can maintain control at distances up to 50 feet. Even charging is simple, thanks to the included inductive charging base (no wires!). Better yet, Sphero delivers over an hour of play on a full charge, easily the best battery life of any toy in our lineup. That’s offset, however, by a three-hour charge time, which is the longest of any device we tested by far. On the plus side, if Sphero needs your attention--when it’s running low on juice, say, or if it’s looking for an iPhone to pair with--it flashes a specific pattern to get your attention, like a silent R2-D2.
Without moving parts to adjust, putting Sphero through its paces is all about software. Happily, there’s plenty of it. The basic control app lets you drive Sphero with a virtual thumbstick, pick a cruising speed (up to a brisk 3mph), change Sphero’s color, and more. Other free apps in the Sphero software family expand on these options, add new ways to use Sphero, or both. Want to draw freehand paths for Sphero to follow, steer with tilt controls, use it as a simple game controller, or combine, edit, and save macros to play special maneuvers with more precise control? There are apps for that. Each activity skews toward younger users, and each is basically a variation on rolling a ball around, but there’s a lot of fun to be had with Sphero for kids of all ages.
Did you grow up watching Airwolf or Blue Thunder, or do you just like to make flying things go pew-pew? If so, the Helo TC Assault copter can help bring your dreams to life.
The Helo is an 8-inch-long attack chopper controlled by radio waves through a clip-on adapter that plugs in to the headphone jack on your iOS device. The adapter’s gamepad-like design (and the weight of its required four AAA batteries) makes an awkward, if serviceable, fit for an iPad, but it’s perfect with an iPhone or iPod touch. It transmits at three different frequencies, so you and two buddies can fight for the sky without crossing signals, which unfortunately we couldn’t test. Charging with the included USB cable took 35 minutes and netted 10 minutes of flight time, average for the toys we looked at. A more serious technical bummer is that the Helo won’t operate reliably in bright sunlight. You’ll have to fly your missions indoors, pilot!
Basic flight controls are simple: a joystick adjusts pitch and rotation, a slider changes rotor speed, and two buttons let you counteract the copter’s inclination to spin with or against the blades’ momentum. You can also swap the throttle’s position for lefties, turn on accelerometer steering (we much preferred the ’stick), and a handy emergency landing button gradually decelerates the rotor if you get in trouble, which you can expect plenty of as you earn your wings. Controls are responsive, but accommodating for the lightweight Helo’s often unpredictable drift is more art than science, and can feel like a matter of luck. Fortunately the copter can take its share of crashes, and two additional rotor blades are included if you have a major mayday.
Once you get the hang of flying, you can record 20 seconds of throttle and joystick maneuvers in three flight plans, an interesting but nonessential feature. Far cooler is the ability to line up a target and shoot two missiles from the Helo, which, while unlikely to do much damage to eyeballs or Ming vases, will knock out lightweight targets with their pleasing range and punch. Eight missiles are included, so fire at will, commander.
If you ever wanted to be a test pilot for top-secret stealth aircraft--only without all the bothersome training and responsibility--the AR.Drone 2.0 may be the closest thing outside of breaking into an Air Force base. It delivers a short-but-sweet rush you won’t find anywhere else.
At one-and-a-half feet long and just shy of a pound, the AR.Drone 2.0 is the heavyweight in our toy throwdown, and it packs some serious technology to match. It’s controlled over Wi-Fi (with a range of 160 feet) by connecting your iOS device to the toy’s onboard 802.11n router. That connection can also record to your device from the drone’s nose-mounted camera (shooting decent photos and great-looking 720p video at 30FPS), or you can connect and record to your USB flash drive to conserve bandwidth for remote control commands. In a nice touch, two removable protective hulls are included to keep you flying safely: one that covers the drone’s already-sturdy body, and another that also guards its more delicate rotors (and, if you maneuver like us, your pets and houseplants).
Flying the AR.Drone 2.0 feels more like controlling a Hollywood prop than a toy; it’s just jaw droppingly cool what you can do. The drone automatically hovers level with the ground, so you can concentrate on making slick maneuvers, like flips with a double-tap, or boldly going over the neighbor’s roof. In the basic control app, climb and directional controls are a simple dual-stick affair, overlaid on video from the camera to keep you oriented. An even easier alternate mode lets you aim the drone relative to you by tilting your device. You can customize other aspects of flight, like maximum speed and altitude, but the distances you’ll cover, and the heights you’ll reach, are really only limited by your Wi-Fi range. Two-player augmented reality shooters and other games are also available for download.
If anything will put a hitch in your flight plans, it’s battery life. A full battery yields a scant 12 minutes of flying time, and takes 90 minutes to recharge. The battery is removable, however, and spares are available for $39.99. But even if you’re using just the one included battery, 12 minutes with the AR.Drone 2.0 is well worth waiting for, again and again.
The Speed King’s no-frills design didn’t exactly get our motors running, and while the Helo TC Assault copter makes for a quick missile-shooting diversion, it couldn’t compare with its bigger airborne cousin, the AR.Drone 2.0.
At $299.95, the AR.Drone 2.0 costs significantly more than other devices we reviewed, but its excellent controls, HD camera, and the sheer gee-whiz factor of sending it zooming to the treetops, then safely back to Earth, blew the competition away. The limited battery life is regrettable, but it’s an understandable tradeoff for the power of the drone’s four mighty rotor blades and the quick maneuverability they provide. We’d love to see longer flight times in a future 3.0 model, but waiting for the current AR.Drone’s battery to recharge feels less like a frustrating technical shortcoming and more like waiting in line for a roller coaster--we always knew the next flight would be a blast. The AR.Drone 2.0 kept us wanting to come back and play, and that--more than any high-tech bells and whistles--is the mark of a truly fun toy.
But wait, there’s more! We can’t conclude our test without giving an honorable mention to the runner-up in our group review, Sphero. Maybe it’s because the approaching holiday season has put us in a good mood, or more likely Sphero is just that cool to play with.
Sphero is definitely the toy that came closest to the AR.Drone 2.0 for sheer fun and replayability. And its durable, waterproof construction, quiet motors, and simple controls make it accessible in ways and places even the AR.Drone can’t touch. Our test cats, for example, didn’t mind chasing, and getting chased by, Sphero one bit. Its healthy battery life makes it a great iOS-controlled toy for children, too, to keep them engaged for more than an hour at a time. The number of Sphero-compatible apps, and the nifty ways they tweak the laid-back Sphero experience, doesn’t hurt its appeal, either. More than just entertainment, Sphero can even border on the educational--gasp!--by subtly teaching basic logic and programming concepts with the free MacroLab macro app.
While it might not offer all the flash and high-octane thrills of our winner, Sphero is a winning mix of old and new toy tech. Don’t let this Bluetooth ball roll away without a second look.
