It’s the only robot vacuum that’s quiet enough that I can run it while my kids are watching TV, which is important because they leave potato chip crumbs all over the place. Their comfort levels with the vac could also be because it came with several sets of stickers to give it a face, so my children have also developed a sort of weird, Wall-E type relationship with it.
This robot vacuum has a comparatively low suction power of 3,200 Pa—even the cheapest robot vacuum I’ve tested recently has a higher suction power, with high-end ones going as high as 20,000 Pa. But the Matic has made me rethink why anyone even needs that much suction. It’s not like I expect any robot vacuum to dig that deep into my carpet fibers. It’s so quiet and efficient that I end up filling the waste bag just as quickly as with a regular vacuum, and I never skip cleanings because it gets lost or stuck or it’s too loud.
Even the accessories are thoughtful. For example, it comes with a little plumber’s snake if the tube gets clogged. It hasn’t happened so far, but this inclusion is genius, because I’ve been using a chopstick to do this for years without even thinking about it. Finally, it’s much more reasonably priced than any other robot vacuum with this level of functionality, even if I can fill up a waste bag in about three days instead of the projected week. (I blame dogs and kids, not the Matic, for our general filth levels.)
There are a lot of features the Matic doesn’t have, including fairly basic ones like dirt detection and gesture and voice controls. Annoyingly, you have to tidy your house up a bit before you clean—while the Matic recognizes pieces bigger than 1 inch as obstacles to avoid, it will vacuum up my son’s Lego blocks if I leave those out. Nariyawala noted in an email, however, that these features should be arriving as software updates in the coming months, and I’ll retest the Matic once they do.
I’m already reluctant to replace it to test other vacuums. Forget the robotic arm and the huge docking station. Just give me a small, cute, quiet robot vacuum that doesn’t take up a ton of space, is adorable and extremely quiet, does everything I tell it to do easily, can learn for itself, knows when it’s flying, and also costs less than a third of what other top-of-the-line vacuums cost. What more could you ask for? Give me three!
