glowing, gushing followup on my merely positive roomba review

Posted on by Luis Villa

So, I had a positive roomba review a few weeks ago. I humbly submit that that review was wrong. What should have happened was a totally raving, ‘this is the greatest thing since sliced bread’ review.

Here is what I know now that I didn’t know then: the old roomba ate things- shoelaces, power cords, rug fringes, etc. This meant that every time you ran the roomba, you had to make the room safe first.

This is no longer the case. The new roomba seems completely unwilling to eat anything. It detects that something is caught and spits it out. I’ve deliberately tried to force it to behave badly, and it refuses.

This might not sound like a big deal if you haven’t had a roomba, but it is actually huge. In the past, running the roomba was sort of a big deal- it was easier than vacuuming, to be sure, but it still took several minutes of scanning the apartment for obstacles and potential problems. Now every single time I leave the apartment I can trivially vacuum. I just hit the button and go, with no worries.

I’m actually now regretting not getting the more advanced model- in the past, the timer (where you can tell the robot to vacuum on specific days at specific times) seemed silly to me, since you’d still have to remember to clean the floor. Now that you don’t, the timer seems like a great idea- but my model won’t support it. Oops.

Overall, not eating things upgrades the new roomba, for me, from ‘pretty nice’ to ‘every apartment should have one.’ Go forth and bring on the robot revolution.

[Not my cat or my roomba, but cute anyway. Picture by Eirik Newth under CC-BY 2.0. Thanks, Eirik!]

Published by Luis Villa

14 thoughts on “glowing, gushing followup on my merely positive roomba review”

  1. vase is obvious- you can drop it or throw it against the wall and it doesn’t break…not that you would throw it, but you know what I mean. Also available in Black, Pink, and Lime. Approx size: 20 x 17 x 17 cm. $24.12 Buy it here. Luis Villa’s Blogglowing, gushing followup on my merely positive roomba review

  3. I’ve been determined to get a Roomba for about six months now. It’s rapidly approaching Christmas. If I ask my loved ones for a robot for Christmas, that’s okay, right? I mean, it’s the 21st century, there’s nothing wrong with this, surely?

    – Chris

  4. Nermal: not mine, see the attribution link below.
    Chris: If they don’t get you a robot for Christmas, your loved ones will be the first against the wall when the robot revolution comes. So, ya know… plan appropriately.

  5. So, can the current version really find its own way back to its base for charging? The one we had a while ago couldn’t, which made the timer feature even more useless.

    (Now, if only it could actually empty itself.)

  8. My last roomba died within days of your last post due to eating a cord. It seems to have stripped the brush gears so they no longer move.

    Guess I’ll get a new one since it seems to have improved.

  10. Actually, the fact that my Roomba requires picking up stuff from the floor has had an even bigger impact on cleanliness than the vacuuming process itself. I now habitually keep the floor clean of things (cables, pens, socks, computers, whatever) just to make running the Roomba is easier.

    I’m lazy, and in this case works out to my advantage: it’s easier to keep things continually tidy than doing a sweep before vacuuming. (I still do a sweep, and lift a few chairs and such off the floor, but it takes very little time or effort.)

  11. Lars, that’s an interesting point. Luis, thank you for such a practical series of gushes. I am not an early adopter, and I depend on people like you to test things out. It’s now on my Stylefeed.

  12. “I am not an early adopter… it is on my stylefeed”… I hope you wrote that fully cognizant of the irony there :)

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