Coming in at a DroneScore of 4.25 out of 5, the Holy Stone HS-160 offers a compact, feature-filled bird, without crashing the wallet. DroneScores spent some quality time with the HS-160, and overall, we felt it’s a solid purchase for the beginner or intermediate drone hobbyist.
It’s not surprising we enjoyed this Holy Stone drone. They’ve delivered some great packages in the last few years. Check out our review on the HS-200 here. Holy Stone makes some of the best little toy drones on the market, and although we at DroneScores haven’t needed Holy Stone customer service, Amazon reviews indicate they are personable and quick to respond to issues. That’s as important to us as much as the performance of the drone itself. Companies in the industry need to stand behind their products, something Holy Stone seems to do well.
Design 5.0
Performance 4.0
Reliability 4.0
Affordability 4.0
We gave the Holy Stone HS-160 the score of 4.25 because we felt it has an innovative design but is a tad high on the price tag. We would strongly suggest a few upgrades, mainly a micro SD holder to record video on the craft itself and not just directly to the phone. Overall, the package was presented nicely and flew surprisingly well. For its compact size, this bird came loaded with some features we really liked. It comes ready with multiple speeds, altitude hold, and headless mode, which we discuss below. We found the battery to be super easy to exchange. For these reasons we would recommend this drone to the beginner or intermediate UAS pilot that wants a toy drone for around the house.
It should be noted right away that unless you have almost completely still air outdoors, the UAS pilot should use this pocket-sized gizmo indoors.
Here’s a quick overview of the drone and what’s include in its packaging:
The first thing we liked was the drone package itself. It’s easy to repack, which most drones aren’t, and it fits conveniently almost anywhere. The drone package is only 4.5 x 4.5 x 6.5 inches and easily fits the foldable drone and a full-sized remote, and the extras. We also want to note key features like the 720p Camera FPV with App control, altitude hold, headless mode, and multiple speeds. All these things add to the flying experience for beginner and intermediate drone pilots alike.
Once out, the drone was unfolded to its full, 6”x 6” size. Two LED’s adorn both the front and back of the craft, like most other hobbyist drones we’ve tested. The small size of the drone makes it ideal for indoor flight, and when it was time to pack it away and take it out for testing, we were impressed with how easy it was to set up and use almost anywhere. Holy Stone marketed this drone as fitting in a pants pocket, much like a cell phone. We wouldn’t recommend carrying it that way, but a person could if they chose to. The compact, foldable design is probably the HS-160’s greatest feature, and it should be strongly considered if the compact size is important to the purchaser.
The HS-160 comes with some great features that make it a lot more fun, the first being altitude hold. Every new drone pilot should have at least one drone that doesn’t have a hover-enabled feature in their drone hanger. Without the feature, the system gives an extra control to monitor, making it similar to a helicopter. The HS-160 fortunately does come equipped with altitude hold, making this particular drone a lot of fun to fly. Having the option to hover frees up brain power to focus on maintaining directional flight, avoiding obstacles, or working the camera. If you choose a different drone for yourself or your child, remember that altitude hold is a great feature and we strongly suggest having it on any drone purchase.
Another great addition to small drones in the past few years is having the option of multiple flying speeds. The HS-160 has four. Holy Stone has given the drone the option to start out slow, speed 1 (tutorial speed), and then graduate up to higher speeds once flying skill has been sharpened. The two slower speeds are really useful indoors where space is limited and smooth inputs make obstacles easier to avoid. Whereas outdoors, the two higher speeds are great for cutting through the wind. This isn’t to say flying outdoors is ever very easy with this drone. It is very light, weighing only 63 grams, about the weight of eleven US quarters. That’s not much weight when combating even a few knots of wind. If you do choose to fly the drone outdoors, fly it on the third or fourth speed, face into the wind, and fly the drone against it. This way, if you lose control, connectivity, or experience a battery outage, the drone will glide and fall toward you, not farther away.
Lastly, headless mode is an additional feature on the HS-160. When turned on using the controller or a connected smartphone, headless mode allows the UAS pilot to control the drone without worrying which direction the drone is facing. Without it, a pilot can easily get confused when the drone is facing them, as the inputs become reversed. In most cases, the inexperienced flier loses control very quickly and must either hit the emergency stop buttons, or crash. Headless mode also allows a much younger child to successfully fly this toy drone. When buying, look for headless mode on every drone purchase. It doesn’t have to be used, but it sure is nice to have when getting a beginner excited about the activity of flying a drone.
The remote control is well laid out, as are all the Holy Stone remotes we have reviewed so far. Having the ability to use one Holy Stone App for all their drones would be nice. We found the app names to be confusing, and having to download three different apps for three Holy Stone drones was a little redundant. Unlike in our HS-200 review, we had no problems keeping the live video feed connected with the HS-160. Once we hooked up our Android Smartphone to the HS-160’s 2.4 GHz network, we received a pretty good first person video (FPV) capture on our screen. In order to integrate our phone with the drone we first installed “HS_D2” app from the play store. The remote includes a smartphone holder that, once attached, connects remote and phone. In all our testing the connectivity seemed to be standard for this toy drone, around 100-125 feet our video signal would cut out. That took place with a full battery, outdoors, and unobstructed, which we don’t advise the beginner drone pilot to attempt. As recommended above, this drone shouldn’t be flown outside unless in ideal weather conditions.
Once connected to a smartphone, the HS-160 can be controlled by gravity sensor mode. This allows the pilot to move their smartphone and it serves as a gyro, making the drone fly according to the phones orientation. The app also controls the recording and playback of video and photos taken with the drone’s adjustable HD camera. Both the app and the controller can be used for one button takeoff and landing, emergency stop, and headless mode. The controller can also be converted for a left handed flier, swapping the functions of the control sticks.
The HS-160 comes equipped with a 720p HD video camera and is capable of taking 2 MP photos with up to 1280 x 720 resolution. As with most drones in its class, the video camera is great for FPV and really adds a lot the flying experience. It isn’t really a content-capturing camera, as the detail isn’t sufficient to do so. However, for a toy drone the camera is a lot of fun.
The HS-160’s camera stores content on the user’s smartphone. We didn’t have any luck getting our videos to save on our Android phone. As stated previously, we hope in the future Holy Stone fits all their drones with an SD card slot, making onboard recording possible. Its great having videos save to a smartphone, but the micro SD card makes transferring media to a computer much easier.
The HS-160 comes with two 3.7V 500mAh lithium polymer batteries. They last seven to eight minutes, while the camera is transmitting or recording. Having an extra battery is nice, but a few more is recommended to shorten charging downtime. Extra batteries can be bought here. A complete charge takes roughly an hour so once the batteries are used, the drone flyer must wait at least 40 minutes to fly again.
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We gave the Holy Stone HS-160 an overall score of 4.25, respectable in the toy drone class. We liked how compact, foldable, and easy it was to transport. While the Smartphone app seemed to work well, we hope in the future Holy Stone will give us an onboard micro SD slot so that videos and pictures don’t require space on a smartphone. While we thought the controller was well laid out, the phone holder seemed tough to install. After only a few wrecks we also had a motor on idle speed, even once the drone was powered down. While we tried difference fixes, nothing seemed to work and our drone was rendered unflyable after only a few days of use. We aren’t blaming Holy Stone for the failure, because we never made them aware of the issue.
We hope as technology improves, so will the reliability of these toy drones. We recommend this drone if a small size really matters to the buyer. There are quadcopters like the VISUO XS809HW, reviewed here, that aren’t as foldable or compact, but offer the same or more features for half the money. This drone is fun to fly, very responsive, and creates a great experience for the beginner or intermediate drone pilot. The price could be a bit lower for our liking, but when isn’t that the case?
