The new robot in the house didn’t make a very positive first impression. Sad to say that second impressions are not much more favorable either. Let’s start with the good things though.

The hardware feels good. The machine is sturdy and its navigation seems solid. It doesn’t bump into everything like the Roomba and doesn’t get stuck on the flat legs of my Poang or my standing desk (which the Roomba regularly did).

Sadly, that’s about it. The software is outrageous. The robot crashes all the time. I’ve yet to see a single cleaning session where I don’t need to attend to it because of some “device exception.” Even if it “recovers” on its own, progress is lost which means that a room that should take 15 minutes to clean takes an hour, because it keeps resetting.

It also means that if it’s also supposed to mop, it goes back to wash its mops every single time. In the past 24 hours it’s gone through two whole tanks of water even though it only has 7-8 “pings” of area to cover.

Last night when it was in its base it kept rebooting every 5 minutes or so for absolutely no reason, playing that stupid Narwal chime every time. Since quite apparently it does not respect the “do not disturb” configuration option, I just muted the volume altogether. Sure I may miss one meaningful notification if it’s about to explode (which at this point I wouldn’t put beyond the software), but I’m not okay with it beeping all the time like it’s an ice cream truck near a grade school. I’m not sure if my manual restart of the robot fixed the non-stop rebooting or I’m just not noticing because it’s muted.

I’m seriously considering returning it as an unusably faulty product. I’m giving it a few days to possibly prove itself, because the return may be tricky to organize, but if there’s no improvement it won’t get to stay.