The French toy drone company, Parrot, has revealed a new model version of its popular Bebop drone, that is capable of longer flight times and faster speeds on Tuesday.
The perfect aerial camera drone, the Bebop, now has a second generation - the Parrot Bebop 2. Wired reported that the Bebop 2 has all the features users would expect from a Parrot drone - slender design, no moving parts besides the drone's propellers, and the 180 degree fisheye camera with 14 megapixels and 3 axis video stabilization. Also, the internal memory is at 8 Gigabyte.
However, one of the biggest changes to the latest drone is the battery life. According to En Gadget, the new Bebop 2 has a flight time of 25 minutes. That is more than twice longer than the 12 minute flight time of the first generation. Moreover, the new quadcopter is also faster, hitting 37 miles per hour when the old version could only top out at 24 miles per hour.
The Verge also stated that the new version has addressed many of the connectivity problems that the first model had, but there was not much detail as to what the company did to do fix these problems. Henri Seydoux, Chief Executive of Parrot, stated that the company stripped out a significant amount of weight by leaning on software.
The Bebop will be available on December 14 for a selling price of $549.99. Anticipating buyers can also opt for the Parrot Skycontroller Black Edition, with an external flight controller that guarantees a Wi-Fi flight range extension of 6,561 feet, for $799.99.
Parrot's drone revenue has seen a large increase in sales, with revenue rising up to 60 percent from the previous year's third quarter, and 87 percent of their sales came from consumer products such as the Bebop and Minidrones. The company will be signing retail agreements with Target and AT&T soon, which is positioned to drive more consumer sales, especially with the new Bebop 2 drone launching during the shopping season.
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