PowerVision PowerEgg drone flies like an eagle, folds up into an egg for easy carrying

Also boasts easy, Wii-style motion control. But mainly, it's a flying, fold-up egg!

Duncan Bell
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Drones are now commonplace in our skies. Everywhere, they're filming, racing, and dropping deadly poison onto crowded football stadiums. Oh no, hang on, that's the plot of Thomas Harris' Black Sunday.

Most drones have three major issues.

1) They are hard to fly if they're not flying directly away from you, because the orientation of the controls changes as it rotates.

2) They are a pain to transport due to their bulk, shape and relative fragility.

3) They do not look enough like a robot egg or rugby ball.

Well, not any more! Meet the PowerVision PowerEgg.

• Check out the best drones in the skies.

• Now read this handy guide to buying a drone.

• Or maybe try doing that in the opposite order.

In the foreground: a PowerEgg readying for lift-off. In the background, on the vaguely futuristic table: the PowerEgg on its charging base.

Once folded into its portable state, the delicate rotors and landing gear are protected, and the Egg can be easily slipped into a bag, or put under your arm and run with, like a rugby ball.

Costing £1,290, and built by a Chinese multinational that's spent the last five years making industrial drones, the PowerEgg boasts the kind of cutting-edge drone spec you'd expect. So there's GPS for easy retrieval and automatic evasion of airports and other places you realy don't wanna be flying drones.

You also get a video camera, shooting at 30fps in UHD or up to 120fps in HD, with "professional grade" results promised. Flying time: 23 minutes.

Here is the PowerEgg in "flight" (okay, just sort of hovering there looking menacing).

What's unique to PowerVision's flyer, apart from its sheer egginess, is the inclusion of a Maestro motion controller alongside the usual twin-joystick "professional" one.

This allows you to ascend, descend and fly in all directions with simple gestures, including being able to spin it around for an aerial selfie without immediately reversing the controls, causing hideous confusion.

Additional control is via the obligatory app, which adds all manner of functionality, from live video monitoring to a variety of navigation modes, including the ability to have it follow you, or fly to GPS way-points tapped on a map.

Range is more limited when using the motion control, but in Professional mode, theovoid robo bird will fly up to 3.5km in Europe and about 5km in the USA. The discrepancy is due to the differing CE and FDA wireless standards. Obvs.

Price £1,290 | Pre-order from PowerVision. Pre-order customers also get a very natty Egg-carrying backpack.

Duncan Bell
Duncan Bell

Duncan is the former lifestyle editor of T3 and has been writing about tech for almost 15 years. He has covered everything from smartphones to headphones, TV to AC and air fryers to the movies of James Bond and obscure anime. His current brief is everything to do with the home and kitchen, which is good because he is an excellent cook, if he says so himself. He also covers cycling and ebikes – like over-using italics, this is another passion of his. In his long and varied lifestyle-tech career he is one of the few people to have been a fitness editor despite being unfit and a cars editor for not one but two websites, despite being unable to drive. He also has about 400 vacuum cleaners, and is possibly the UK's leading expert on cordless vacuum cleaners, despite being decidedly messy. A cricket fan for over 30 years, he also recently become T3's cricket editor, writing about how to stream obscure T20 tournaments, and turning out some typically no-nonsense opinions on the world's top teams and players.

Before T3, Duncan was a music and film reviewer, worked for a magazine about gambling that employed a surprisingly large number of convicted criminals, and then a magazine called Bizarre that was essentially like a cross between Reddit and DeviantArt, before the invention of the internet. There was also a lengthy period where he essentially wrote all of T3 magazine every month for about 3 years. 

A broadcaster, raconteur and public speaker, Duncan used to be on telly loads, but an unfortunate incident put a stop to that, so he now largely contents himself with telling people, "I used to be on the TV, you know."

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