Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Update: Now I know why all the reviews were so good and my experience was so bad. I received an email from the company offering me a $100 gift card to delete my review. I think it would be prudent for the company to instead put these funds into R&D to make a product that functions as advertised. Because of the skewed and misleading reviews I made what could have been a very expensive mistake, and I don’t think that’s fair to take advantage of people like that. Original review: Never completed a cleaning I bought this particular vacuum as an upgrade from another brand, because I was really interested in the obstacle avoidance. I am disabled and have a very hard time rescuing vacuums who get stuck frequently, so this seemed like I was going to be perfect for me. I have had 4 different floor robots and this one was BY FAR the worst and not being able to clean independently, complete a map, or be able to be controlled from the app. It never finished a single cleaning or made it back to the charging dock on its own, and most times it couldn’t even make it out of the room it started in. The map it created had to be redone multiple times because it would leave out entire rooms: it would make the map to what it could see from outside of the doorway, and you could tell the door was fully open with a clear path, but for whatever reason it chose not to go inside the room to finish mapping it and there was no way to manually add a room either. After having to reset the map to get the master bedroom to be recognized by the device (only about a foot inside the doorway could be cleaned in a zone cleanup), I tried 20+ times to create a new map but since the thing could never complete a cleaning without shutting itself off somewhere random I never did get a full map of my 2 bedroom, single floor apartment. Another interesting thing (and MAJOR issue) is if you want to clean while you’re out, the robot will take itself offline and go into standby mode within a few minutes of getting stuck on a real or imaginary obstacle. So basically if you get a notification that the robot was stuck and didn’t attend to it right away, it would shut off power (which can only be turned back on by holding to power button on the vacuum for several seconds) and it would lose its progress in the cleaning cycle. Sometimes I would get excited because I didn’t receive a stuck notification, so I figured maybe the robot completed its first full cleaning cycle. But then I would come look and there is the robot, 5 feet from the dock without a single obstacle anywhere near it, completely shut off and cannot be restarted by the app. It’s like having a toddler. I would come home expecting a clean floor and instead I had to search for a vacuum which was not responding or showing up on the map, because despite having a 75% full battery this battery saving feature makes it act like it’s completely dead and lost behind a piece of furniture somewhere. My floor is not a bad environment for a vacuum either, actually the previous one rarely got stuck but because of my disability the obstacle avoidance promises of this one were really appealing to me, and so I stupidly thought this would improve my quality of life by removing the occasional stuck-robot hassle. I am glad I was able to return this and get a better robot. For comparison, I had a low end robo rock which was great but didn’t give me the zone options I needed. It rarely ever got stuck though and cleaned amazing. I then upgraded for a high end robo rock, and was not quite as satisfied regarding value as I was with the first “dumb robot.” The high end did have more quirks than I felt it should for the cost, got stuck more frequently and functionality of the app was a bit iffy but still within tolerable ranges. On a friends recommendation I got this deebot and this was the worst of any I’ve ever messed with. I couldn’t believe I was wishing for my cheap dumb robot back because the T8 was such a nightmare to do anything with. I looked for hours for another replacement and I hesitantly got the 360 S9 and honestly it’s got everything I was looking for and at a lower price point. I really don’t know how the T8 has so many positive reviews but I really had the absolute worst time with it, and even as an extremely tech-savvy person there was nothing to be done to get this thing to work or even finish a complete room reliably.