I live in a small two bedroom house. The reality is that two bedroom house is a bedroom, a study, and then the necessary other bits. A place to shower, a place to toilet, a place to cook, a place to eat, and a small place to put the TV. A hallway. Very normal, house stuff.
I have a modem that is complete overkill for the size of my house. This means I get awesome WIFI coverage dozens of metres away from my house. Enter the Samsung Powerbot X40, the newest member of my household, born on the 9th of April, 2020. Henceforth, the Robot Vacuum shall be referred to as "Dusty."
Like any infant, or newborn family member, Dusty required a bit of guidance and time to adapt to its new environment. The first time, it couldn't make its way back to its dock on its own, letting out a wailing beep of despair as it gave up after becoming lost in a maze of dining chair legs and the cavern that is below the dinner table.
Not only did Dusty get lost in the minotaur's maze benneath the dining table, but it made an awful racket while doing so, clanging into metal chair legs and pushing their lightweight frames along the tiled floor in an effort to wrench itself away from its self made prison.
It wasn't just chairs it'd careen toward. Bookshelves, (against solid walls), the fridge, the filing cabinet, my computer chair - it'd engage in a Carmageddon style race to see how many things it could hit in any single given vacuum session.
The floor types in the house are tiles and floating floor, with a rug in one room. Dusty is also not capable of adequately cleaning the rug, and becomes easily clogged, requiring manual intervention mid-clean - even when using the highest suction power option - this means it sucks, but it also sucks at sucking - something I've always wanted to say when I'm reviewing any thing. What a time to be alive.
In addition, Dusty is lazy. He fails to consistently clean the house in its entirety, missing areas of the home on a regular basis. Dusty is not an adequate replacement for human labour, as the areas he misses are the areas that I must clean manually. For the sticker price, I'd expect to never have to pick up the vacuum stick ever again!
I cannot fathom how this device would function in a larger home given the poor quality of its performance in a small home.
Then, there's the idiosyncrasies of Dusty's logic - if it runs out of battery mid-cleaning cycle, it'll return to its dock (when it can!) to recharge. Once it is done recharging, it is designed to return to the last spot it vacuumed, and continue the job.
What does it do?
The moment it leaves the dock, it starts to suck again. Instead of returning to the last known location with the vacuum turned off (and turning it back on at the last known location) - the little logic circuits seem to think that it is a useful expenditure of electricity to re-clean the ground over which it may have covered previously.
That is... if it takes the same route, or doesn't get stuck against a door frame with its impeccable logic.
The companion app (a portion of Samsung's interestingly named "Smart Things" app) offers limited functionality, and often doesn't synchronise with the status of our dear friend Dusty. Dusty might be on the dock, calmly charging, but the app will tell you that Dusty is on a cleaning mission.
You get an aerial view of the rooms cleaned, but there's no option to overlay a floor plan of your house, tell the machine where the dock is, and then see the areas that were cleaned in that given session. The app is a genuine minimum viable product - and serves to offer very little actual utility.
There isn't even an option to update the firmware - I assume that this action takes place automagically via wifi - but there's no confirmation or user feedback to suggest that Samsung are interested in Dusty's longevity and increasingly frustrating failures as a domestic appliance.
I want to love Dusty, and I want to love this robot vacuum, but there's three words that will sum up my review. Dusty sucks badly.
I'll be investigating warranty options, in the hope that Dusty may've been dropped on his head as a wee-infant-sentient robot vacuum machine, but I expect that I will remain engaged in a jovial customer service experience on the journey to a consumer's dream: actually getting what I paid for.
I rate this vacuum Zero out of Five Dust Bins - do not buy - do not approach.