RC Submarine | Sub-Sonic XP

Let's face it, radio controlled submarines are just a cool concept. Silverlit Electronics' remote control submarine named "Sub-Sonic XP" is no exception. I recently got a chance to play with one for a couple of days. Check out the footage of a couple of my friends and me playing with it in a pool while on vacation to the Rocky Mountain National Park.

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For a small toy submarine, the Sub-Sonic XP is fairly complex. The controller has dual thumb-sticks, each of which control one of the rear propellers. To go straight, you push both up. To go backwards, you push both down. If you want to turn or spin, then you either only use a single thumb-stick or do a combination of one up and one down.

The two shoulder-buttons control the submerge and emerge of the remote control sub. Essentially, there are 3 propellers on the sub. Two control the horizontal direction of the sub, and one controls the vertical depth of the submarine.

The best way that I found to get it to dive was to let the sub come to rest, and then hit the submerge shoulder button. When it was under water about 1 foot, hit the emerge button once (which would stop the submerging). Then, you could start tooling around with the thumb sticks. If you kept submerging, you might get it to suction on to the bottom of the pool (which isn't a problem). We even got it suctioned to the side a couple times. You can drive around with the submerge or emerge propeller running, too. This makes for interesting and fun loops and flips.

The Sub-Sonic XP comes with the controller, the charging base, and the mini toy sub itself. The remote controller takes 1 9V battery, while the charging base needs 3 AA batteries. The RC submarine itself has it's own rechargeable battery, and to charge it, you place it on the charging base for about 3 minutes. Then, they say it's good to go for about 3 minutes. It seemed to me that it lasted much longer than 3 minutes, but I would say that after about 3 minutes it would start to get a bit touchy about how close it was to the controller. If you started getting too far away, it might stop functioning, and that range decreased when the battery got lower. After the battery started getting real low, it would start to behave erratically and do things like only operate one of the propellers at a time.

All-in-all, this RC submarine is well worth it's low price. If you like hobby style radio controlled submarines or you're just looking for a fun lake or pool toy, look no further. Play-Asia has the Sub-Sonic XP, and I think you'll find it to be quite impressive and enjoyable.