Holy Stone HS110G Review: Smash Hit or a Huge Miss?

If you need a reliable but beginner-friendly drone to kick things off in your UAV adventures, you may have already become frustrated in your hunt. A lot of drones are being offered at super-affordable prices, but a large number of them don’t even begin to justify their throwaway price points.

Most of them are — here goes nothing — consumer electronic junk.

Drone manufacturer Holy Stone is trying to do something a little bit different. They have been supplying the market with some of the most reliable drone models at competitive (see: bargain) prices. Sure, they don’t get them all right, but some of them are pretty darn good.

The Holy Stone HS110G is one of the brand’s more low budget options, though it is clearly outside of toy drone territory.

Its smart flight features and safety functions give it an edge over its competitors, not to mention coming equipped with a reliable camera unit.

We couldn’t wait to get stuck into this Holy Stone HS110G review to determine whether this was another hit or miss from the China-based manufacturer.

Quick Specs

Weight	Unloaded: 176 grams
Size	Length: 12 in Width: 7.6 in Height: 3.6 in
Speed	3-speed setting
Signal	Range: ~300 m
Battery	Flight time: ~13 mins Capacity: 1500 mAh
Recording	Camera: 1080p HD, 110°

Holy Stone HS110G Features

GPS GNSS

The Holy Stone HS110G has a GPS global navigation satellite system, allowing it to accurately pinpoint its location to use its intuitive features effectively, giving you real-time access to location and positioning data. This also makes the drone stable during automated flight or hover mode, giving you extra assurance that the craft won’t veer off path or slowly drift towards impending doom.

It’s amazing how Holy Stone incorporated a GPS module with the Holy Stone HS110G, whereas other drone manufacturers would gladly skimp out on this deal breaker of a feature. Good on Holy Stone.

One Key Takeoff/Landing

The Holy Stone HS110G has a One Key Takeoff and Landing function to aid beginners in initializing or retrieving the craft without much hassle. This takes away the newbie anxiety by removing the maneuver factor, saving you precious battery time by performing these preset movements.

Custom Flight Path

The Holy Stone HS110G also has a waypoint mode to make things easier when you’re trying to switch locations, or just want to try out the feature for the heck of it. Simply draw a route on the Holy Stone smartphone app and the drone will follow obediently.

Return to Home

With the GPS functionality, you’d bet the Holy Stone HS110G came with a Return to Home function. It’s handy for when the drone is low on juice or has a spotty connection with the transmission signal, or can even be prompted manually for those lazy enough to retrieve it with controls. The Holy Stone HS110G does this by recording its initial take-off point, then backtracking when the mode is active.

Headless Mode

As with most beginner drones, the complicated matter of a drone’s 3-axis flight movement can disorient amateurs quite easily. This is easily solved by the Holy Stone HS110G’s Headless Mode.

Headless Mode dismisses the drone’s front-end orientation, allowing you to control it in a straightforward manner with the directional lever. Forward is forward, left is left, and so on and so forth. You’d still have to be careful though, as the Holy Stone HS110G doesn’t have obstacle detection features to aid you in flight.

Follow Me

Give your videos that fresh and wide-capturing third-person perspective with the Holy Stone HS110G’s Follow Me mode. It bases on the transmission signal of the remote controller, so no intuitive, visual tracking algorithm here. Still, it’s better than nothing when you want to go hands-free with your scenic shots.

Hover Mode

The Holy Stone HS110G can be set to Hover mode to capture stable videos or selfies. This has the drone hovering at a fixed altitude, though be warned that the light 176-gram weight of the craft might find it hard to stabilize during windy conditions.

Battery Life

The Holy Stone HS110G has a 1500 mAh battery that supplies up to 13 minutes of flight time, though this might vary depending on usage. This is quite decent for a drone of this price, as most of them can only achieve around 8 measly minutes at best.

Charging the Holy Stone HS110G’s batteries is another story though, as it takes 3 hours before they are back to full power. You may want to stock up on spares to extend your flight sessions.

Camera

Imagine getting a 1080p HD camera on a drone under $200. The Holy Stone HS110G does exactly this, giving you excellent shooting capabilities on a budget. It’s worthy of an inclusion for one of the best cheap drones with a camera.

Moreover, you can control the perspective with the 90° tilt function, giving you some degree of flexibility when shooting. Its wide-angle, 110° field of view also means you get more footage in a single frame.

Performance-wise, the Holy Stone HS110G performs as it’s supposed to, giving you excellent quality shots and videos, albeit no stabilization features are offered. Be aware that low-light situations might also affect shooting quality, resulting in grainy or noise-riddled captures.

Ease Of Use

The Holy Stone HS110G’s controller does away with the teenage or gamer-targeted controller design and instead opts for a more professional aesthetic.

Sleek and sharp lines accentuate the classy black finish of the controller, and employs the standard dual joystick layout, with a neat button population on the face, which also adds in some LED indicators for various statuses like battery and pairing status.

It offers a smartphone latch to let you enjoy the Holy Stone HS110G’s capabilities, as well as assimilating the drone’s digital and tactile controls into one platform. All in all, the drone controller is well-balanced, ergonomic, and aesthetically pleasing, which is quite rare for what you get at this price point.

Design and Build Quality

The symmetrical quadcopter design of the Holy Stone HS110G is more than a welcome sight for beginners wanting to show it off to their friends, sporting minimal markings (just banding on the arms and a GPS logo at the center), and is finished in a premium black coat that doesn’t look cheap considering the drone’s plastic construction. It also has LED units by the arms to light up and act as markers during night flying, and also serve as indicators for the pairing status of the craft.

The Holy Stone HS110G is constructed from durable plastic, which we infer is of the ABS kind. This makes it extra rugged against crashes and collisions, though we do not condone drunk flying.

The legs are extra long, as with other Holy Stone drones, giving extra clearance of safety for the camera during landing maneuvers, especially on uneven surfaces.

Performance

The Holy Stone HS110G works like a dream in terms of controller response, doing your bidding in real-time without any hiccups.

While it sports a 300-meter range, we don’t really think you’d be comfortable flying it that far considering its battery life, as you have to secure some headroom for the return journey. Still, it isn’t bad knowing your UAV is capable of such range.

The Holy Stone HS110G has a speed limiter by way of three speed modes, which can be of great help to beginners and the drone itself in worries of crashes and collisions. It is set to the lowest mode by default, which you can gradually adjust as you progress in skill and confidence level. Make no mistake though, as the Holy Stone HS110G can zip past you in the hands of a capable pilot.

Final Thoughts

Going back to our previous statement of Holy Stone’s drones sometimes being a hit or miss, the Holy Stone HS110G is definitely a bulls-eye.

Getting the beginner starter pack down, such as easy take-off and landing, headless mode, return to home and other functions — these are great enough, but even throwing in a GPS module in the mix? Outstanding move. Even the 1080p camera is an added bonus.

To make the Holy Stone HS110G extra enjoyable and viable for practice flights, though, we highly recommend that you get spare battery packs as the drone is crippled by the lengthy recharge time. Unless you’re happy flying it for 13 minutes between charges, of course.

Also, note that you have no obstacle-detection features to fall back on in case of confined flight spaces or near-crash encounters, so be careful when flying the craft for a safe and regret-free experience.

The Holy Stone HS110G is definitely on the higher positions of the list of drones we’d recommend for aspiring UAV pilots. With a slight bump in your budget, we’d have some capable, bang-for-the-buck suggestions in mind as well.

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