Like many people I bought into the excitement with Solo based on marketing 3DR successfully pulled off dubbing Solo the first smart drone ever. This is based on Solo's patented Smart Shots that take the skill out of getting the perfect aerial shot, and was marketed to enable you to allow the drone to either control the camera while you fly the drone, or have Solo control the drone while you control the camera, conducting a two person task but requiring only one person to operate the drone, hence the name Solo. Though automated modes (like orbit, follow, and cable cam) are pretty standard now with most all drones available after 2015.

Customer service is another thing that initially sold many people on Solo with their fly away protection that claims 3DR will replace your Solo and GoPro camera in the event of a fly away (thats not pilot error). Although, there are many other things that could cause you to need 3DR customer support which I will get into further down.

Next lets talk flight times. Users were promised 20 minutes on a fully charged battery and when I first purchased my Solo I was getting around 17-18 minutes without a gimbal. 8 months later and I’m only around 11-12 minutes (without a gimbal) and light use.

What’s the range? Solo is the worst drone amongst its competitors in regards to range. Without upgrading to better aftermarket antennas your looking at around 300-500 yards before Solo hits Return To Home mode (known as RTH), results improve if your in a rural area with virtually no wifi interference. If your in a really congested area like NYC, it could be substantially less. Some say you want to always maintain eye contact while flying but depending on the situation for the shot you need, this is a major problem because that range is also the same for altitude but less. You also have to consider limitations when flying a programmed mission.

Upon Solo’s debut 3DR was scrutinized for pushing to release Solo in June 2015 despite complications with their camera gimbal that caused Solo users to wait months before it became readily available sometime in late August 2015, and still had serious bugs to be worked out. Even now users still casually report complications with Solo's gimbal.The major issue with the gimbal is that it produces a large amount of vibration and jello in your footage which is mostly due to the bad factory assembly of the gimbal's HDMI cable, which once in flight, picks up a ton of vibration thats seen in your recorded video footage. The only solution to this problem is to purchase an after market HDMI flat ribbon cable which is thin enough to pick up much less vibration and shake. It's now April 2016 and this issue has yet to be corrected by 3DR themselves. Solo also has an issue that requires it to take a much longer time than any of its competitor’s drones to get a satellite lock, and once again the only solution is to upgrade the satellite chip yourself. Also if you want to fix the range issue internally, you would have to upgrade the wifi card in both your Solo and the controller. Which brings me to my next point, unless you plan to modify/customize Solo to make it better, don't bother buying it. If your intimidated about taking things apart and putting them back together, I do not recommend buying Solo.

3DR also promised the addition of other camera gimbals to enable Solo users to mount other cameras besides the GoPro series action cameras. As we see at NAB 2016, that promise has not been upheld unless of course your looking for a strap on accessory to mount a 360 degree camera setup, or looking for a infrared camera that most civilian users have no use for, or even a commercial camera setup for 3DR's newest commercial software Site Scan, which retails at over $6,837-8,025. 3DR's spokesman Colin Guinn, mentioned several times last year and even at NAB 2015, that Solo users would see a gimbal coming for the new Black Magic Micro cams which has yet to be developed.

As far as customer service, unfortunately for me back around January 2016, 3DR issued an update for the newly added Smart Shots and functionality of controlling the GoPro through the Solo app (which we were promised when Solo debuted in June 2015), after updating my only 5 month old Solo, it wouldn't connect with my controller when I would power up Solo, the controller, and the app. I would have to restart Solo several times before finally connecting, which if out in the field is not good at all, especially with the already long satellite locking times. Also during this same time while out flying Solo upon landing Solo touched the ground and out of no where went into RTH mode and shot straight up into the air nearly crashing into power lines and costing me the $1000 I spent for it. SoI called Solo customer support only to get a message that customer service is no longer available over the phone and is now email support only. Once I submitted a trouble ticket I was contacted two days later by Mike Martinez who required me to first send photos of my receipt, and Solo's serial number despite me having already registered my Solo online, I also had to send a video of the incident (thank God I recorded it), and a log report from the already not connecting Solo. If this wasn't already overwhelming, he said he never received the first 3 times I sent the logs from the controller (of course from the connectivity issue I mentioned), this process alone took a week to complete. I ended up having to do a process that was pretty technical requiring me to connect my Solo controller to my Mac, then enter a series of different code in a Linux based MS-DOS system, which if one character is entered wrong will cause you to have to restart the whole process. This was a very annoying process that was a headache to do, and afterwards Mike simply told me everything looked fine and that there was no issue. I complained that I still had the connectivity problem every time I turn on my Solo but he just continued giving me task to do that were very technical and later passed me on to a engineer named Francisco A.. Francisco was no different than Mike and again after 20 days of dealing with technical support he sent me an email informing that the code looked good and there was no connectivity issue. This infuriated me!!! This problem was never resolved, and I never had my Solo replaced with another one. So there's your report on customer service.

Lastly lets talk about Solo's value, when I bought my Solo, I paid $1000 without the gimbal, and the gimbal sold for another $400. I wanted to shoot in 4k so I payed another $500 for my GoPro 4 Black and another $80 for a high bit rate 64GB SDChip. This doesn’t include the price of upgrades, so you see I spent over $2000 for my Solo. Then 5 months after I purchased it, for $1000 you get the Solo and gimbal, you talk about a punch in the face. Also Solo's resale value is really poor. Word has gotten around about the out of the box Solo performance and gimbal poor gimbal quality, and of course that means trying to sell Solo isn't an easy thing. I see guys online place their Solo's for sale and wait months with no buyer. Just go on Ebay and search used 3DR Solo and watch an item til it sells. You'll see guys selling Solo with a gimbal, backpack, and multiple spare batteries for only about $1100. Used Solo's by themselves are averaging about $500. And there's plenty of them for sale. Most guys put them up for sale on Facebook and forums and they never sell so they are forced to sell for nearly nothing or keep them.
As a Solo user who's apart of all the Solo forums and multiple Solo Facebook groups, if I did it all over again, I would have bought a DJI Phantom 3/4 or Inspire 1 over Solo.

Love the Solo and now that the gimbal has arrived it is only better. Easy to use and setup with my Galaxy S5.

I like the quick buttons for "follow me mode", "selfie", "hover ", etc.

Still getting accustomed to the controls and will update as I progress. First impressions and use are absolutely great.