Unaccompanied Minor: Sky Trakr

Tweet

This Spy Trakr is an RC (remote control) vehicle. I am going to split this review into four sections – the good and bad of the RC vehicle itself and the good and bad of the controller. This RC vehicle is for ages 8 and up.  It is pretty cool looking.  It looks like an undercover robot with it’s big wheels and grey and black colors.

First the controller. There are many capable features on the controller. One is that it has a built-in speaker and you can hear things through it that are picked up by the RC vehicle. There is also a color video screen on the controller and you can see what the vehicle sees. It also has steering controls. There are levers that allow you to go right, left, and backwards.  It takes time to get used to the controls but after you get the hang of it, it’s really fun to use.  You have program buttons. The menu button lets you scroll through the different options for what the Spy Trakr can do.

Now for some of the bad.  It’s is a little small for bigger hands, but it would be a fine size for an 8 year old. The connection from the remote to the Trakr vehicle isn’t always consist on its signal.  It seems to lose the connection sometimes.  I wish this were better. I also wish the screen to see what your vehicle can see was a little bigger.  It’s about 1.5”x1” which is fairly small, but maybe it’s fine for an 8 year old’s eyes.

Moving on to the Spy Trakr vehicle.  It has a built in SD memory slot, an accessory port and an USB port.  The SD is good for recording videos and audio.  The USB and accessory port are both two ways to bring over information from the vehicle to your computer.  These are all good features to have.  One additional thing that comes in the box is a USB cord. It has an antenna that is fold-able so it doesn’t break which is really good because when you need to store it you can just fold it down and it won’t be in the way and is not likely to get broken off. I really like that the Trakr has stealth wheel treads which makes it an off-road type of RC vehicle.  It also has a built-in microphone and speaker to receive and send out to your controller what your vehicle just heard.  This, I think, is a really good feature of this RC.  It has night vision LED which allows the RC to move around at night and still be able to see clear (as clear as you can in a small screen).  Last but not least, it has an adjustable video camera that you can only adjust with your hand. 

This leads me to my first item that I think could be better.  I wish that the controller had a mechanism that allowed you to control the camera so you could raise or lower it on the vehicle in order to get a better view of something. Another thing I wish could be better is that the RC uses about ten batteries which is a lot for an RC vehicle.  It uses AA batteries.  I also wish that with all these batteries that it could move a little faster. 

All in all, I would rate this whole Spy Trakr a 7 out of 10.  But I am 12 years old.  I think from the perspective of an 8 year old, I would rate this a 9 out of 10 because it has a cool appearance, it can record and video tape stuff, but I think they would like it better if they could control the camera height and direction and get some of the upgrades that I mentioned above including a bigger screen.