Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is probably one of the most difficult reviews I’ve ever written. I’m having trouble deciding how many stars to give it and I’m having trouble deciding who will love this vacuum and who will hate it. I’ll give you a quick summary first, because I have a hunch this review might ramble on a bit. ______________________ Summary: * HARDWARE: The hardware device is amazing. With a few small exceptions, I absolutely LOVE this vacuum. It is very thorough and my carpets look better than they ever have. * APP: Horrible. Really bad. Ordinarily I wouldn’t include the companion app in my review of an item, but the app and robot are so tightly integrated that I can’t leave the app out of my review. This app has some major flaws though and the Dyson support team didn’t give me the impression that the bugs would be resolved any time soon. * TECH TOLERANCE: This is harder to put into words, but I think it’s important to note that this is a gizmo for people who fully embrace technology. Although my wife absolutely LOVES the results from this vacuum, she would be frustrated to no end if she didn’t have me around to operate it. But I think of people like my mother and there’s no way she could use this in her home. ______________________ Details: Yes, my overall impression of this device is pretty harsh, but I actually really truly love it. It has become part of our family. You have to name the device, so I involved my son in the process. I thought we would name it Wall-E after the Pixar character who cleaned up the junked Earth, or even Floor-E since it only works on the floor, but my son immediately looked at the silver cylinder form factor and named it “Ding Dong” after the foil wrapped Hostess snack cakes. So be it: Ding Dong. On the other extreme is our dog. She absolutely hates Ding Dong. We have two dogs and one of them could care less, but our other dog barks constantly whenever the device is running. It was so bad that I would go out of my way to make sure it wasn’t running when our dog was in the house. But after nine days now, the dog has finally made peace with Ding Dong and she doesn’t freak out anymore. On the subject of the dogs though, we aren’t what I would call “neat freaks” in our house. We vacuum at least once a week, usually twice. The floors usually look pretty good, but if you walk around in bare socks you’re going to notice a surprising amount of dog hair on your socks. Since we have had this robot vacuum online, we have vacuumed our house four times in nine days, and that’s with a high quality Dyson vacuum. Even so, the dust container fills up every single day. I’ve kept close track of the amount of crud that it pulled up (for the sake of my own satisfaction and also to share here in this review) and this tough little ‘bot has filled more than a gallon Ziploc bag full of dust and hair. (I should mention that I have a short-haired dog, a long-haired dog, and a long-haired wife). I have been astonished at the amount of fur, hair, and fine particulate dust it has sucked up. It’s incredible. And for this reason alone, we absolutely love this dear little machine. It’s so nice to come home at the end of the day and see the pristine carpets and see the how much stuff it has sucked up. I also run it while we sleep, so we have the same wonderful experience when we get up in the morning. It does a great job of moving from room to room doing its thing. It will run for about 35 minutes before it decides it needs a rest and returns to its dock. This means that the area closest to the dock is spotless and the areas further away don’t get as much attention. This can be solved by moving the dock from room to room throughout the week. It’s interesting to see the choices that it makes in its path. From our family room where we normally dock it, there is a fork in the floor that either takes you to our kitchen or to our formal dining room and front room. When I look at its activity map in the app, it shows how Ding Dong has forked to one of the rooms and focused on that room (after doing the family room near the dock) before it runs low on power and returns to the dock. So session by session, there is a 50% chance for us that it will do one room versus the other. Interesting. As it moves around the house and negotiates the obstacles (furniture, shoes, etc.) it draws a boundary map showing where it had to stop and turn. Eventually these boundaries connect together and draw our floorplan. It’s surprising to me though that it starts from scratch with every session instead of slowly drawing a map of our home. Instead it learns and re-learns the topography of our house every time it runs. I guess that makes sense since some of the obstacles move around (like my son’s shoes). There are two ways to control it: Bend over and push the button and let it do its thing. OR... Turn it on via the app. The button method works great if you’re home, but if you want to control it remotely when you’re away, the app is the only way (or the scheduler...more on that in a bit). Turning it on and off from the app has worked pretty well, but not perfectly. When it doesn’t work, it simply doesn’t work and there aren’t many suggestions to help you. The “App offline” status seems to mean that it parked itself someplace other than the dock and it isn’t responding. Or it might be running. Who can know. “Connection lost” doesn’t tell you much either, except that the status is red instead of blue. In these nine days of consistent use, I’ve seen one of these two errors at three or four of the days. The errors basically tell me that it won’t have been running when I get home, so don’t expect squeaky clean rugs. Even worse is the scheduler. First of all, there is a bug in the app for setting your location. If your city name has more than one word (Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, etc.), then the location won’t save. You have to pick a one-word city if you want it to save. Secondly, whoever set up the list of locations in the app has (A) never designed software before and (B) evidently never been to Earth before. The location picker should give you the chance to pick your country, then state, then city. That would have been good software design. But no, you need to pick your location from the entire planet, where the list shows country and city divided by a slash: “America/Los Angeles” (except I can’t pick Los Angeles or it will default back to London because it can’t save a city with two words or more). Since it’s just one long list with every country/city name they could think of, it’s very difficult to navigate on your phone. Remember, there are a lot of countries and cities on Earth. Now about America: Technically yes, everything from Yukon, Canada to Tierra del Fuego, Chile are all in “America”, but early explorers somehow decided to chop it up into North, Central, and South Americas and chopped it up even further into individual countries and states. Comically, some U.S. states are listed (America/Indiana/Indianapolis), but California somehow didn’t make the list. After learning of this bug, I picked America/Monterey, but evidently this is a different Monterey, not the one in California (let alone America!). I ended up picking America/Tijuana (which is technically in Mexico, but at least this gets me into the Pacific time-zone). After finally resolving my location and solving the time zone thing, the scheduler still didn’t work. I had set it for 11:00 pm (23:00), which it somehow translated to 9:00. I have a screen shot on my iPhone that shows the alert that popped up at 9:00 pm telling me that a scheduled clean was set to start at 23:00, but it couldn’t start. So it got the time wrong and it couldn’t even start anyway. I could manually start it, but the scheduled clean wouldn’t work. Even if it did work, it wouldn’t make sense anyway because you can’t specify an end time. So it would start, but presumably continue running forever. So the designers hadn’t ever used a schedule before and don’t know how countries, states, and multi-worded cities work. Another frustration is the maps. When they work, it’s really fantastic to see where it cleaned. Even more important is the fact that that it shows you where it crashed if something bad happened. So far Ding Dong has gotten stuck under our dining room hutch (where I NEVER would have found her had there not been a red dot on the map) and once in the clutter of some cables under my desk. In those cases the maps were fantastic. But about 20% of the time when I bring up the Activity it shows a “Map not available” error and there’s nothing to see. Sadness. One point to mention about your house: I live in a two story house and have only used it downstairs so far. The instructions make it pretty clear to treat this valuable device like you’d treat a toddler (except for the part where you make it stay up all night cleaning your house and leave it home alone during the day) where was I, treat it like a toddler and don’t let it get near the stairs. Being the knuckle-dragging dude I am, I had to put this to the test, so I set it on our landing and turned it on. It cleaned the landing quite nicely, and then every time it got near the drop-off for the stairs, it stopped, pondered, turned around, and resumed cleaning. It did a great job at detecting the stairs and turning around, but I still don’t know that I would take the chance of letting it run upstairs without putting up a child gate or something up there to keep it safe. So all in all, the device itself is incredible but the app is barely even half baked. With a current price of just under a grand, this is pretty disappointing. Hardware is hard and robotic hardware is even harder. How they could drop the ball on the easy parts (like moderately bug-free software and an accurate geographical representation of the American continents) is a big failure. So how do I come up with a star rating for this? If the vacuum itself had a little bigger dust cup I would give it six out of five stars (yeah, I know that’s impossible), but the app is barely good for two stars. I guess I’ll punt and give it four stars, because I know they’ll eventually fix the app. _________________________ EDIT (9/13/16): The app has been updated and it includes a fix for the user's location. Now the list is sorted by UTC time, so I could pick "(UTC-07:00) Los Angeles". We're actually eight hours off from Greenwich Mean Time, so we'll see if it self-adjusts in a few weeks when Daylight Saving is over. Scheduling is still erratic and doesn't seem well thought out to me. You can still start a start time, but no end time. My experience with scheduling has been either (1) I get a message telling me that the scheduled event failed to start or (B) it starts and then somehow poops out and I have to hunt it down and carry it back to its dock. When it poops out it doesn't save a progress map, so I can't tell how much it covered except for visually inspecting the carpets and looking at how full/empty the cup is. I'm still trying to figure out if this all just spells bad luck for me or if the schedule is actually faulty. It seems much more reliable when I manually launch it from the app when I leave the house in the morning and/or when I head off to bed. I am still DAZZLED by the amount of crud this little bot picks up. We're still averaging one full waste basket of dust and hair per week (disgusting!). Our son heads off to college next week, so maybe there will be lest dirt tracked into the house. Oh, one other nice feature that was added with this app update is a setting for Max or Quiet. The quiet setting doesn't seem that much quieter to me, so I usually just leave it on Max. It's a nice option though. Even the Max setting doesn't seem that loud to me. I've never heard it running at night. _________________________ EDIT (10/20/16): Another five and a half weeks later since my last update update message here, my wife looked at me and said, "This thing sucks, doesn't it." I replied, "You mean 'sucks' with all the mighty sucking action power of a thousand dollar vacuum?" No, she meant that this thing is completely unreliable and it simply sucks. It gives errors and faults more often than not. I changed the schedule to run at 9:00 am in full daylight hoping that it would have better luck, but I'm lucky if it actually runs more than once a week without conking out. The two typical scenarios for me are either (A) I get an alert on my iPhone telling me that "Ding Dong is scheduled to start at 9:00" immediately followed by "Ding Dong failed to start", gee thanks for nothing, or (B) I get the startup message at 9:00 and then sometime within the next ten minutes I get another message telling me that "A fault has been detected". A fault. It's not MY fault. Ding Dong doesn't seem to take the blame and announce that it was his fault either. Simply a fault. This isn't any help when I'm at work and Ding Dong should be toiling away for me. When I return home I find it in the middle of the floor completely unobstructed and a red light is blinking on one side or the other, as if it had a little stroke. An inexplicable fault. Those faults are really frustrating. I see it for myself when I'm home while it's running. I often run it while I cook dinner before my wife gets home. It will run for ten minutes or so and then stop and send me a "fault" alert on my phone. When I walk over and look at it, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it besides the fact that it apparently suffered an eAnxiety eAttack (that's what neurotic robots do). So I bend over and reassuringly push it's button to tell it that everything is OK, and then it continues on as if nothing had happened. What the hell?!?! What was so crucial that it had to throw a fault and shut down? And why is it perfectly content to resume when I press its button? We're Americans! We didn't get where we are by quitting at the first sign of adversity!!! Why not program a "retry" into its routine and see if whatever fault it detected was actually real or just imaginary?!?! But no. My Ding Dong is a quitter and my wife is right. It sucks.