Yesterday we were blown away by Griffin’s upcoming $49.99 HELO TC iOS-controlled helicopter, for a number of good reasons. First off, it’s a sixth of the price of the Parrot AR.Drone and the announcement was accompanied by an awesome video which I’ll embed again just for fun:
Initially, I was under the incorrect assumption that this was going to be a two horse race between Parrot and Griffin for iOS real-world aerial superiority, but boy was I wrong. As it turns out, there’s quite a few options already in existence that you can order today in a variety of different sizes and price points.
Almost immediately after posting the HELO TC article, I was emailed by Gerard Nieuwenhuis who runs iHelicopters.net who told me about his variety of ready to ship helicopters that use a similar free app to control them. The main difference being, instead of requiring AA batteries to power the IR transmitter, the iHelicopter transmitter is powered by rechargeable batteries.
There’s even a Kickstarter-funded option, iRemoco which similarly uses its own app. Crazier yet, infamous Chinese-knockoff seller DealExtreme even has a whole array of their own iOS-choppers.
There’s not much variance in the pricing between iHelicopters, iRemoco, Griffin, and DealExtreme, so I think we’re going to need to do an (entirely unexpected) iOS-controlled helicopter shootout to really determine who is the king of the App Store air space. Who knew such a seemingly specific product would have such a crowded marketplace?
