Neato Robotic Vacuums - The New Best Robot Vacuum

The Neato Robotic Vacuum has been receiving great reviews since its recent introduction to the market, and promises to be the first robot vacuum to give the Roomba some serious competition in the popular robotic vacuum cleaner market this Christmas, and in the future. The Neato seems to do everything the Roomba can do, and possibly better.

The Neato relies on powerful vacuum suction and a Room Positioning System that allows the Neato to map out a room and plan the best approach. This eliminates the need for 'Lighthouse' units such as with the Roomba vacuums to tell the robot vacuum to finish one room before moving to the next. Neato recognizes the wisdom of this for itself.

While the Neato lacks a sidebrush -a lack much touted by the Roomba diehards- the Neato's powerful vacuum suction and ability to get right into corners may make the purported lack irrelevent. An additional benefit of Neato's reliance on vacuum power as opposed to brushes is less maintenance. The bane of the Roomba is the frequent need to clean the brushes.

The Neato robotic vacuum cleaner begins its chores by working around the perimeter of a room, mapping it out with laser technology and planning its attack. Much like an upright vacuum, the suction power and open-ended brush pull in dust, debris and pet hair tumbleweeds from along the wall as the Neato slowly makes it rounds.

And the Neato does move slower than the Roomba. Combined with the high vacuum power, this allows the Neato to deep clean in a single pass, rather than needing to go over each area five different times as the Roomba does to get it clean.

The squared-off front of the Neato allows it to vacuum right into the corners, again using its single brush, slow deep-cleaning movement and powerful suction to draw in corner debris much as an upright vacuum cleaner would. To be fair, an upright vacuum doesn't typically do a phenomenal job cleaning along wall edges and in corners.

Wall edges may be one area where the Roomba does have the Neato beat. The Roomba side-brush feature -while not so very effective in corners- does do a good job at eliminating pet hair buildup along footboards.

With the Neato, time alone will tell at this early point, but we may find a need to manually clean along footboards every few weeks, just as is necessary with standard uprights. Early reports and reviews do not indicate that this will be an especial problem, no lack has been officially noted here in the Neato, but speculation is such based on the design of the Neato and the lack of a side-brush.

We all wait to see on that one. In the meantime what we've learned is that with the vacuuming power of the Neato being 5 or 6 times as great as that of the Roomba, there is no great tangling of hairs in the single Neato brush. The lesser vacuum suction of the Roomba results in a far greater amount of pet and human hair getting caught up in the brushes, whereas the superior vacuum power of the Neato just sucks these hairs straight in.

The Neato robot vacuum starts off with a superior concept than the Roomba, and with a concept improvements in the Roomba line have unfortunately showed no indication of moving towards. The Roomba is a random creature, humming mindlessly along and vacuuming floors clean mostly by luck. The Neato is a smart robot.

The Neato robot vacuum seeks input on its own, interprets the data it discovers and reacts accordingly. It adapts to its environment and remains constantly aware of changes in that environment to which it must re-adapt. If the Neato is busily vacuuming a room and an obstacle is suddenly placed in front of it, the Neato will simply go around it and reroute its course.

The Neato isn't a blind robot randomly bumping its way around your house doing its thing. It knows what it has to do, where all it has to go, and the Neato plans its mission intelligently.

Like with any robot vacuum, the Neato will probably do a better job on your floors than you have generally been doing, and so will likely need a helping hand the first time or two that it does its rounds. It will likely suck up quite a lot of debris, and may need its bin changed before it can finish the job.

This is normal with robotic floor vacuums the first time or two it is used. Moving forward you should be able to leave the Neato unattended and merely empty the bin once at some point after each use.

When the Neato has finished its work it will return to its charging base if it knows where it is. But if you manually started the Neato away from its base, and the Neato didn't pass the charging base during its work, then it may not be able to find its way home. :-(

This is typical in robot vacuums. Many simply will shut themselves off and give up, waiting for you to come find it. The Neato will return to the place where you started it.

A really neat feature of the Neato made possible by the advanced mapping system is that it remembers what it has done. This not only prevents it from wasting energy repeating itself, but if the Neato should be near to running out of juice before completing its chores, the robot vacuum will return to its charging base and recharge a bit. Thirty to sixty minutes later, the Neato will return to where it left off at, overlap on what it had already done just a tiny bit to be sure, and then continue on with its unfinished work!

This amazing technology in a vacuum cleaner allows for a much greater capacity. The square footage battery limits becomes less relevent, though as with anything the more it is used the quicker it will probably wear out.

Though only the first generation of the Neato is out, it already is looking better than the Roomba's 3rd generation vacuum robots. The construction is solid, nothing flimsy or cheap, and the techonology is quite advanced.

The only thing still questionable is longevity of the device, and where upgrades and future developments may take Neato Robotics. Maybe the 2nd generation will see that side-brush, or maybe by then we'll know it isn't needed.

As far as longevity goes, it won't have to perform too well to meet current industry expectations. The average life-span of the Roomba isn't all that impressive, and Roomba will tell you themselves that performance will greatly decrease before the warranty expires, (one year limited on both the Roomba and the Neato).

With the greatly reduced maintenance demands of the Neato, perhaps we will find it outlives Roomba and other robot vacuums on the market quite easily.

Read my article on the Latest Models of the iRobot Roomba Robotic Vacuum to learn more about Roombas.

Also check out my look at the iRobot Floor Washing Scooba Robot.

Here's a useful 2010 List of Great Christmas Gift Ideas for Moms.

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