After having been able to enjoy the convenience of an Anker Eufy r500 (successor to the 11s) for 2 months, bought from a 'conculega' of Coolblue, it broke and was refunded. Coolblue had an offer of this Deebot 901, which brought a smarter robot vacuum cleaner to replace the Eufy within the budget. Because I now have experience with a considerably cheaper, dumber, vacuum cleaner and a smart one, I focus the review on this.
The Eufy did its job haphazardly, but after about an hour it had done our entire ground floor of about 30 m2 in total. With its 6 cm it could also go under everything and taking obstacles was no problem. The suction technology was quite impressive for such a cheap vacuum cleaner: The device only produced around 50 dB of noise and detected when it came on our mid-pile carpet and then automatically started sucking a little harder. And actually everything, except in corners, was picked up. Unfortunately, it broke pretty quickly. And with the suction off (eg when he was on his way to his dock) he was almost inaudible. Also nice that you could control it 'manually' with the remote control.
Then this Deebot 901: For starters, it's definitely not a noise maker. Certainly on the 'normal' suction power you can still hear the TV just fine. Unfortunately, it does produce a pretty annoying high-frequency (in the thousands of Hz) beep at this suction power. Despite my middle age, I'm still sensitive to that, so that's quite a minus. Fortunately, the beep at the maximum suction power is gone and the noise is not too bad. But I don't want to let it work at that noise level if, for example, our daughter is sleeping. The vacuum cleaner also makes audibly more noise due to its drive mechanism (a bit of a 'whining' motor noise, as if the motor is having a bit of trouble). In terms of motor and suction technology, this robot does not seem to have the very latest technology and, in my view, it performs 'less' than the latest 'dumber' models of the competition.
What is really nice about this vacuum cleaner is that it 'scans' the room with its rotating sensor and then maps out an optimal path. Especially once the map is made, it can cover our ground floor in just under 35 minutes. It is also nice to see how he elegantly first tackles the edges and corners and also carefully turns around furniture legs. Despite the 'roof' with the rotating sensor, it is still low enough to get through under our sofa and other upstanding furniture.
However, the 'smartness' of this vacuum cleaner is also its major weakness (which means that it scores lower for me on several points than if it were better in order. The software of the device, both in the vacuum cleaner itself and the Android app , are substandard in my opinion. It actually starts with the setup of the Android app and WiFi connection of the vacuum cleaner: The Android app needs a large load of permissions, of which only a few can be substantiated for the functionality that Furthermore, it was very difficult to get the vacuum cleaner on the WiFi network. After trying many WiFi settings in the access points, the major problem with registration eventually turned out to be because modern Android smartphones open a 4G connection in addition to WiFi, as soon as the WiFi network does not provide internet access, so the smartphone could no longer access the internal IP on the vacuum cleaner's WiFi network to set it up for the first time. set. With mobile internet 'hard' turned off in Android, it was a breeze to get the vacuum cleaner set up.
Then another major stumbling block: Getting the card vacuumed and created for the first time: For reasons that are hard to understand, the vacuum cleaner MUST complete its first round on its own without any interruptions, before saving the card 'finally'. This shouldn't be necessary with a little good firmware design. The vacuum cleaner dares to climb on many things: the bottom plate of the cat scratching post, the 1.5 cm higher beams of our Ikea armchairs, etc. However, sometimes it can't find a way out and gives up, only to report that it ' lifted'. Poof, immediately remove the card, so start over. It would also be nice if there was an option to occasionally set the vacuum cleaner to work on the upper floor without immediately throwing the card away from below. A third drawback is that manual control is no longer possible at all in terms of the direction it has to go. Yes, you can indicate on the map one area per 'scoon making assignment' that he has to do and you can create virtual walls. But, for example, quickly sending the arrow keys into the hallway to clean there too (even if the door to the hallway was closed when creating the initial card because of the cats) would be nice. Furthermore, I also once had that for unclear reasons he thought that the environment had changed and so just threw away his card, while he was in a familiar environment.
In other words: Ecovacs would like to emphasize how smart the vacuum cleaner is, but it is nowhere near smart enough to immediately make a somewhat more flexible or manual control unnecessary. Still, they've left those options out, partly as a likely conscious choice (no more arrow buttons) and partly because the device's firmware itself is still full of bugs.
Sharing the vacuum cleaner with a separate Ecovacs account of my friend for her own phone did not go smoothly either. I needed support for this (who also responds very nicely and within 24 hours, but did not immediately understand me at first).
In other words, long story short: In the current state of the Android app and the firmware in particular, I cannot immediately call the vacuum cleaner a recommendation. Therefore, after deliberation, clicked on "not recommended". This could easily be done with some firmware updates and an update of the Android app.
