 This is one of those beautiful spring days when it feels great to just be outside. I love getting shots like this. Hello Mr. Swan. You are majestic. Okay this is gonna be my opening shot. Zooming under this bridge and now I'm turning around. Okay or not. Okay I've lost my connection. It's just hovering now. There's somebody over there. She's walking her dog. Maybe if I fiddle pull this back. No. Okay now it's moving again. This is bad. Please stop. Oh god. Out of the way lady. Reviewing a drone in many ways it's like reviewing a phone. How long does the battery last? Is the software intuitive? How does the hardware stack up against the competition in terms of power and speed? But before you get to all that there is one simple question you need to answer. If I put this thing in the air can I be sure that I can control it safely? With the new Bebop drone from Parrot the answer is too often no. Parrot had one of the most successful drones from the first generation of consumer quadcopters but it was definitely a toy. For the Bebop Parrot's vision is to transform their offering from a toy into a tool. Something anyone could use to capture high-quality photos and videos from a great distance. Like Parrot's earlier models you can control the Bebop with just a smartphone or tablet but you could also use a more traditional controller which Parrot said extends the range of the unit to 1.2 miles. Unfortunately in our testing the connection between the pilot and drone was simply not reliable. When using my phone I would often lose connection to a Bebop flying just a dozen feet away. I got nothing. I got no control. So the drone got maybe like what 12 feet away and we lost our connection and now it's just going on its own. I literally just lost the signal again like I'm not in control of this drone right now. In the best-case scenario it more or less hovered in place while I furiously clicked through my settings and the app trying to reconnect. In the worst case it just kept flying wherever it was headed. Perfect. Now there are some nice things about the Bebop. It's very small and light, fits easily into a backpack, even my two-year-old toddler can carry it. It's cheap at $499 although that price doesn't include the optional Sky Controller which tax on another 400 bucks. And the video the Bebop captures while not as nice as you might get from the latest GoPro is good enough to make friends on Facebook jealous of your latest hiking trip or surfing adventure. When it maintains its connection the Bebop flies well. For complete beginners the fact that the Bebop uses a smartphone as the controller makes it really approachable. It might be good enough for some very limited flying just as you learn but for really getting the most out of your drone the app as a controller falls way short. It can be hard to see the screen and figure out how to toggle between menus to get to all your controls. The Bebop does come with a hood which you can wear to block out light but in our testing this was pretty awkward and not always safe. The Bebop takes a really unique approach to its camera. Rather than mounting an external unit underneath with a gimbal it has an internal camera with a fisheye lens. You can use your thumb in the app or a special joystick on the Sky Controller to pan around 180 degrees within the camera's field of view. This can prove really useful. If you're out trying to get a shot you can just let the drone hover in place and focus on framing without worrying about where you're headed. The drawback is that all the video footage has a slightly stilted quality to it as a result of being stabilized with software and when you do crash the lens on the camera is in prime position to bear the brunt of the impact. The basic Bebop comes with two batteries but you're not going to get a lot of flight time out of them. I averaged between 10 and 12 minutes depending on the wind and the number of backflips I decided to do. That's far less than the 15 to 20 minutes you can get on many comparable drones. And after having spent a couple of weeks with the Bebop I have to say the overall build quality is a little suspect. The power button on the Sky Controller popped off and the covers on the bottom of the aircraft fell off as soon as I pulled it out of the box. This same issue shows up with the battery. For some reason Para designed it in such a way that it never really snaps into place with a solid connection. To solve this they provided a little velcro strap you can use to secure the battery in place. This is literally putting a band-aid on a design issue. And after any amount of rigorous flying I always found the battery had slipped a bit leaving a noticeable gap. The Bebop feels like it landed right in between a tool and a toy. In terms of its price and feature set that makes it unique in the market. When it works you're getting a great value but the build quality and software lack attention to detail and the number of times we lost connection paired with Parrot's ambitious claims about range are frankly a little dangerous. The Bebop is a drone that gets a lot right but it also promises you can do things which it is really not reliable enough to safely attempt.