I’ve been flying commercially since 2017 and I’ve tried a lot of devices. Despite being a dedicated android guy since android 2.1 I soon gave up on them due to the varying levels of compatibility. Those of you who’ve been there know what I mean, some android devices are brilliant, some can be flakey and some don’t work at all. Of course that’s down mostly to the various skins and mods that the different manufacturers load to make their devices stand out not the android itself, the closer to stock vanilla andoid you get the better it works but none the less, having to mess around for 20 minutes in front of a client is not a good look.
I bought a
smart controller and found that while it was a brilliant form factor and ran vanilla android and worked fine with the standard DJI apps it’s lack lustre cpu and bare minimum of ram made it somewhat marginal when I started loading third party packages that I needed in commercial operations assuming I could load them at all so I sold it.
After trying a few apple devices like Rchawks I settled on a top model iPad Mini 5 with a hoodman and have been using that with great results for a couple of years. The screen wasn’t as bright as I liked especially in the bright Aussie sun or flying at sea but that’s what the hoodman was for and as far as performance and reliability went it is flawless.
Then a month or so ago I took a recurring job until the end of the year for a geo consultancy group who required that I use Pix4dcapture to match the flights of the previous pilot. Sadly IOS support for Pix4dcapture is not a primary concern for the developer who concentrate on android and in particular it lacks the ability to import polygon area maps in .kml format in the IOS version so I was back looking for android device.
Enter the Tripltek Pro. There’s only one dealer in Australia and at $1049 Australian it’s not cheap but I bit the bullet and I have to say that so far having used it with DJI Go4, DJI Fly, Litchi, Drone Deploy, Pix4d and the Chasing app it’s 100% rock solid. You do need to load the fly app from a link on the Tripltek support page, I’m not quite sure why as it is a 64bit device but it’s painless and works first time. It has a huge battery at 10000mah, the screen is adequate in size, very bright and if I ever have to use it somewhere extreme like at sea the hoodman from my iPad Mini fits it perfectly. It has a whole heap of positive points which I’ll leave to the reviews and only one negative I’ve found which is the anaemic 10w charger which the manufacturer insists you use claiming that after market fast chargers cause issues with cell balancing due to the large battery *shrug* “on to every sunny day a little rain must fall”.
Since I’ve had it the iPad Mini has not had an outing.
Regards
Ari