Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let's start with the good, shall we? First off, the features you get for this price is great. I chose this robot for really one feature and that was the systematic row by row cleaning on carpet and hard floors. This was the only product I found at this price that offered it (there was a deebot that came close, but it is only an option on hard floors). To sweeten the pot, it "mops" too. Now you are probably asking, how well does it work? To be fair, this is my first robot vacuum, so I don't have a lot to compare to. I know better than to try to compare it to my standard vacuum, because they are made for 2 different jobs. I've had the E25 for 2 days now, and it does exactly what it says. It cleans the floor in nice straight lines. I've run it on carpets, tile and luxury vinyl plank. It sucks up dirt, dust and small debris very well. It even pulled in scraps of paper. I didn't have any trouble with it getting tangled in cords. As expected, it does much better on hard floors than the carpet. In fairness, though, the hard floors had been recently vacuumed, before I ran it, but the carpets had not, as I was just trying it out. (All of my carpets are upstairs and I don't plan on carrying it upstairs on a regular basis). I have not had any issues with it being able to return to the charger on its own, and it has not gotten itself stuck yet (in the 4 times it has run). I have stairs, and it cleaned right up to the edge without falling down with no problem. I have dark floors (dark red browns and black wood grain) next to very light tile, and it is not fooled by it at all. (Some robots mistake black or dark floors for cliffs). I did see it hesitate in the hallway where we have dark grout between lighter colored tiles, but it figured it out and went on about its business. It does bump into things as it goes, which is to be expected but it's not hard. It even slows down as it approaches objects (though thinner obstacles like chair legs seem to catch it by surprise, and it does hit them a bit harder). As far as noise goes, it has different power settings, and the more power you use the louder it is, but it's nowhere near as loud as a conventional vacuum. The dustbin seems a bit on the small side, and it did overfill when I ran it on the carpets (again I didn't pre-vacuum like I probably should have). I read a lot of reviews while researching which one to buy and that seems to be a common theme for almost every brand the first time you run it, so I'm withholding judgment on the dustbin until I have used it some more. The battery life is more than enough to clean my entire downstairs which is all hard floors and around 400 to 500 square feet, and still have more than 50% battery leftover. Now for the so-so. There's really only one feature here and that is the mopping. It's pretty much what you expect. It would give you what you could do own your own if you used a swiffer and didn't try very hard. But on the other hand, if the floors aren't too bad, then it does an adequate job that you did not have to do. You do have to fill its tank, attach it and then take it off again, when it's done, so it's not something that can be automated, while you are out of the house. Now for the not-so-great: the manual and the app. The manual that comes with the vacuum might as well have a Chinese flag watermark on every page as the English is so awful that you are constantly reminded where it was made. Some examples: it flip flops between calling the air filter on the dustbin a "filter" and a "strainer", it sometimes calls the mopping pad a "filter", and the sum total of the instructions for using the phone app is "Connect your mobile phone client (this can be skipped)". No where in the manual does it tell you the name of the app or have a qr code to take you to said app. Speaking of the app, the android app asks for nearly every permission a phone app can, as many reviews note. To be fair this company makes a lot more stuff than just vacuums, and they only have one app for everything, but I really didn't like giving away all of that privacy for a vacuum. Luckily, I had an old android phone laying around that I wiped (factory reset) and then set up a dummy Gmail account on that I'll never use for anything else. So now I don't care what permissions it has. Getting the app to work was painful. It took several attempts and in the end, I'm still not sure what I did to get it to link up to the vacuum, but once it was linked, I've had no problems connecting. While you can run the vacuum without the app, here are all the features you lose without it: Scheduling automated cleanings Mode selection (setting the vacuum strength) Carpet identification, (it ramps up the Suction, when it thinks it's on carpet) Mopping mode (greatly reduces suction while mopping) Remote control Ability to see how much battery is left or know how long it has been cleaning Access to cleaning logs and maps Ability to see how long until scheduled maintenance is needed for the various parts Locate robot feature. Setting the volume of the robot's "voice" Setting the language of the robot voice. Notifications from the robot on your phone about problems it has. (It does say these out loud while running, but it is very hard to understand over the noise, and you have to be in the same room at the time) Alexa skills Once I got the app working, it was pretty straight forward, though some features were hard to find. Just to give a further example of how poorly they understand American culture, the app will sometimes refer to you as "my master", which is really off putting (the app does ask which country you are in and I selected USA). This leads me to the worst thing about this whole thing the Roborock web site. The English on the site makes the manual look like a Dickens novel. It's really bad. They at least used spell check on the manual. For example, the bot comes with a card that says you can get 20% off accessories, if you register your vacuum, but if you go to their website and go to the registration page for vacuums, it just says "COMMING SOON". Also, I notice that the poor syntax on the web site greatly resembles many of the 5 star reviews on here, which is why I felt compelled to leave the review. The Alexa skills are pretty sparse, it's just run or stop, but I don't nt care as I won't be using Alexa to run the vacuum. Due to the poor documentation and how hard it was to get the app to, work, I'm removing one star. If I need support later on, I'll update my review based on the quality of the support I get. Which leads me to everyone's favorite part, would I recommend this robot vacuum to someone else, and it would be “Yes, but..." I would only recommend it to someone who is technology savvy, or someone who can live with just a robot vacvum that only runs at normal power and has to be started by hand each time.