Packaging & Design
The 668-A3 comes with the blade protectors attached, and if you don’t want to risk damaging the blades and having to replace them, the blade guards so offers some degree of protection, especially for beginners getting to grips with flying a drone. There are no spare blades provided within the box. Rest assured though, the blades are quite sturdy so should take quite a lot of hits before having to find replacements.
There are 2 variants of the 668-A3, with or without the gyro stabilized onboard camera, and we were sent the latter to review, and in all honesty if there was a camera to play with as well, we’d probably have crash the 668-A3 even more!
The included manual is written in Chinese and passable English, but the 668-A3 is simple to use and doesn’t require much of reading the manual to operate. You’ll eventually figure out what everything does by reading the manual and trial and error if the manual is unclear.
First impressions of the 668-A3 is that it is VERY lightweight, at just 77grammes, and the body is made from moulded plastics and you do wonder if there’s anything inside! Attaching the blade protectors and landing gears is a simple snap-in process.
Flipping the 668-A3 over and unclipping the bottom compartment, you can see the internal battery. You use the small white connector to hook up to a USB charger, and when in use you reattach the white connector back to the internal control system. I found a full charge need at least 20 minutes, and even though its stated in the specifications you can get 9-10 minutes of flying time, I got about 7-8 minutes.
A conventional flight controller design is provided instead of the gamepad style flight controller some other quadcopter’s come with. Taking 4xAA batteries, the 668-A3 setup uses the 2.4GHz wireless band. This flight controller weighs 166 grams (without batteries) making it relatively lightweight and isn’t tiring to hold. Construction wise it is made of hard plastic and feels of high quality and extremely solid. Ergonomically you will find grips on the underside of the controller and a handle at the top for easy carrying.
The flight controller has analog sticks that stick out higher making it useful for both thumb flyers and pinch flyers (thumb and index fingers) to use. The movement of the sticks are excellent, does not stick in use, and offers equal amounts of spring loaded tension on both sticks. It feels like it has wide range of motion to work with, making it very linear and very progressive in the way the command slowly ramps up over how far you move the analog sticks. This makes for more precise flights and means the 668-A3 doesn’t suffer from touchy throttle or sensitive reactions. Placed strategically beside the analog sticks are buttons which control the respective “trim” of the 668-A3, making them easily accessible with the tops of your thumbs. The left analog stick is the throttle and yaw stick. The right analog stick is the pitch and roll stick.
The power switch is smack in the center, and with the red power LED above. At the bottom of the throttle stick, if you click left that will enable and disable the LED lights, and if you click right is the “return to home” function from whichever direction the 668-A3 left. At the right of the throttle stick is the buttons for photo and video record if you get the camera version.
At the left of the pitch and roll stick is the forward/backward pitch trim, if you find the drone is going forward or backwards on its down. Press once and more times in whichever direction to correct it, so it stays centered. Or you may purposely trim full forward to fight against strong wind and vice versa. At the bottom of the pitch and roll stick is the roll trim. If you find it is moving sideways or rolling to a certain side on its own, press once or more times in either direction to make it centered.
The top left button is the speed switch, for which there are 3 modes on the 668-A3. Once pressed, an audible beep differentiates which mode you are in, one beep (standard), two beeps (medium), and three beeps (high-sport mode) is straightforward to understand.
