Take a look at the comparison toward the end of this video. While the regular Phantom 4 looks great, the P4P+ is sharper, handles backlighting slightly better, and retains more detail in the shadows.
Don't Hit Me, Bro
The Phantom 4 was the first DJI drone to offer obstacle avoidance, but it only worked when flying forward. The P4P+ has visual obstacle avoidance going forward, backward, as well as downward. I found that it worked extremely well in all three directions. Actually there were times when I wished it would let me get closer to an object (when swooping under a bridge, for example), but I suppose it's best that it errs on the side of caution. When it flies close to an object the drone slows itself down or stops all together, giving you an audible alert via the remote control. It has some lateral obstacle avoidance, too, but it only works in beginner and tripod modes and it isn't as robust as the forward/backward avoidance. Overall it felt like the safest drone I've ever flown.
I spent some time exploring those smartmodes, which let you send the drone through different automated flight paths. Orbit mode lets you set a center point and fly circles around it, with a variety of options for speed, distance, and altitude, and it worked extremely well. Tripod mode will net you an extremely stable shot, as if the camera were sitting on an aerial tripod. The modes I was most interested in were the active track modes where you tap a subject on the screen and the drone follows it. It did extremely well in flat, clear environments, but it gets confused easily by other objects, such as large rocks. The "profile follow" mode is designed to fly alongside you and it produces some great visuals, but if you hit the brakes too quickly it'll fly right by you. At one point in this mode, it just stopped and followed me with the camera but refused to move, like a petulant toddler.
My biggest gripe with the tracking mode is that the drone won't change altitude to maintain a relative distance, so if you're going downhill you'll just keep shrinking further and further away until it loses you. Tracking me through an altitude change, of course, exactly what I want in a follow-me mode: when I'm mountain biking down a hillside or snowboarding in a remote area. It seems that DJI is close to making this a reality (and it will be a real breakthrough when it does), but it's going to take all of the sensors working together, and possibly being able to inspect the terrain it's heading toward from a greater distance. Maybe in the Phantom 5.
Wide Streams
The P4P+ has a 4.3 mile signal range (up from 3 miles on the regular P4), which is way further than I was willing to let it fly. It also has a larger 5,870 mAh battery (up from 5,350 mAh), which gives it 30 minutes of flying time per charge (up from 28), despite all the additional sensors. It has indoor flight sensors that work at distances up to 100 feet away (up from 50), giving you very stable hovering, even where there's no GPS to tell it where to pin itself. It broadcasts on both 2.4GHz and 5.8GHz for better Wi-Fi image reliability (the regular P4 only used 2.4GHz).
I did have some bugginess when trying to stream to Facebook. I streamed four minutes of flying in an area with solid 4G reception (for my Verizon Mi-Fi which was broadcasting Wi-Fi for the remote), but the video was truncated to just 34 seconds of extremely glitchy footage. Friends who were watching live reported that the video kept freezing. I got similar, though not quite as bad, results on a home Wi-Fi network. What's worse is that it's supposed to record audio from the remote control so you can talk though your flight for the live video, but once the drone launched all it recorded was a loud clicking sound. This isn't generally a problem when using the DJI Go app on iOS or Android, so I suspect there's some work still to be done on the remote's software. Other apps on the remote (Facebook, for example) are extremely wonky, too.
Overall, however, the Phantom 4 Pro+ is the best drone I've ever flown. It lacks the compact portability of the new DJI Spark or last year's DJI Mavic Pro, but image quality on the P4P+ really blows those out of the water. If you already have the P4 it's probably not worth upgrading, but if you have an older drone and some extra cash in your pocket, it's definitely worth a step up.
There are plenty of ways it could continue to improve, but for now it's the gold-standard. For $1,800, it had better be.
Brent Rose is currently traveling the US living in a high-tech van. Follow him on Connected States and on Twitter.
