S188 Drone Review

Our S188 drone cost about A$85.22 from Aliexpress and was delivered to Australia in exactly two weeks. It arrived in a cardboard box with a carry case inside and included the drone, remote control, double charging cable (charges both drone and remote control at the same time) and manuals.

The drone itself is quite small and folds up to fit in the carry case.

The remote control includes an LCD screen which is very useful compared to cheaper drones. The remote control has a holder for a mobile phone with the RXDrone app installed to see a live video feed and can also be used to control the drone and access advanced features like following you, navigating to waypoints and stunts.

I had a lot of trouble getting the RX Drone app (Android) to show live video and record video. Turning airplane mode on seemed to help, but sometimes it took many attempts to get video. I think what helps is turning on airplane mode, enabling Wifi and connecting to the drone all before starting RXDrone. [FIXED BY INSTALLING RXDRONE 1.4.6 - SEE BELOW]

I also sometimes had trouble in calibrating the drone before it would take off. I don't have a solution for this other than just keep trying until calibration completes successfully.

Camera quality is quite poor. It was advertised as 8K triple cameras but has one camera and the resolution is 1920x1080. Still photos save at 16MP and 5333x3000 resolution but are not good quality and nowhere near as good as they sound. There is no gimbal so the picture moves around wildly as the drone manoeuvres.

There are also lots of gaps in videos, possibly due to constant Wifi disconnections and reconnections.

You can rotate the camera vertically from the remote, so you can view anywhere from straight up to straight down.

It does fly quite well and respond to commands well. However, at times it can be confusing to control and this may be either inexperience or headless mode, where the controls vary depending on whether the drone is facing the controller or away from it.

It hovers well but does move around a bit in all directions. We have tried it in winds up to 15km/h and it copes well but does need corrections.

It is very slow to descend and land. You pull down on the joystick and it takes forever to come down, and the longer it takes the more corrections you need to do to avoid obstacles.

We are yet to try out some features like return to home, mostly because of bad experiences with a prior drone which would return to a random location far from the take off location.

The battery has lasted a little over ten minutes before giving a low battery warning where it still shows 50% remaining. If you are courageous you may be able to get close to twenty minutes flight time, although fifteen minutes would be a more realistic and safe maximum.

Most S188 sellers only offer one battery and buying a second battery adds to the cost considerably. There are other models that come with two or three batteries that might be a better option if you don't want to have to wait 90 minutes between flights for charging.

Although it is little hard to recommend the S188 drone, it is priced half way between the really cheap drones (A$30) and better drones ($200+) and it is a reasonable choice if you don't want to spend $200 or more.

Our previous drone was an S135 which did not have any issues with recording or Wifi dropouts, and had a much higher quality camera and a gimbal. Although it did sometimes have a mind of its own and took off in the wrong direction on a couple of occasions when returning to home. Unfortunately this drone crashed multiple times and was destroyed beyond repair within two days.

UPDATE: We had a lot of problems getting the live video preview and video recording working. I found this TikTok video where somebody explains how to revert to an older version of RXDrone, v1.4.6, and this solved the problem. Or see my instructions.

We have also now tested a few of the GPS features. Return to home is very useful and reasonably accurate. We have had it return to within a metre of the take-off location, but we've also had it attempt to land more than five metres away -- where there was a building -- and have had to take over and land ourselves.

We have tried to fly long distance over bushland where we have line of sight to the drone. We have flown somewhere around 400 metres. You can't even see or hear the drone at that distance but it still sends back live video, although it does break up at times. On one flight we used the return to home function which worked well. It's a great feeling when you can finally here the drone and then see it returning. On another flight the controller and phone disconnected at around 400 metres and we almost gave up hope on seeing the drone again, but fortunately it has a feature where it will return to home if disconnected for six seconds, and it was a big relief when it not only came into view but landed one metre away from where it took off.

Here is a single video frame from one of those longer flights, looking home from about 400 metres away: