back to article Samsung NaviBot robot cleaner

There’s no doubt about it - cleaning is a chore, for some much more than others. I tend to the view that vacuuming isn’t fun unless it makes the carpet change colour. Add a moulting cat, and a lot of clutter, and you can understand why people suggest I get a cleaner. Samsung Navibot Samsung's Navibot: taking the metal mickey …

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  1. Popup

    How does it compare with the competition?

    This is by no means the first robotic hoover. The Electrolux Trilobite came out in 2001 (and was ridiculously expensive), and iRobot Roomba somewhat later. (I got my first in 2003 and by then they had been around for some time.)

    This looks a bit like a copy of Roomba 500, but it would indeed be interesting to see the differences.

    Or, to get an IT angle, take it apart and look at the actual hardware, compare the algorithms etc.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Get Kim and Aggie in there

    Looks like there's enough for a 30 minute episode.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Coffee/keyboard

    Euuughhhh...

    ...can I recommend Napalm. Best thing for that flat.....dread to think what the fridge is like....

    1. Nigel Whitfield.

      The fridge is fine, thanks!

      There's nothing untoward in the fridge. Everything in there has a sell by date from this century.

  4. Natalie Gritpants
    Boffin

    Humans are much better

    Bedroom shame indeed! (not the first time you've heard that phrase I guess)

    You call that clean? For that amount of money you can get at least 40 hours of cleaning time from a human, probably enough for you flat for a year, which is probably longer than that robot will last. Or you could just do it yourself

  5. Giddy Kipper
    WTF?

    Something for the weekend sir?

    The barber's chair in the bedroom? Good grief man! Think of the Daily Fail readers;

    http://bit.ly/cnMauM

  6. James Hughes 1

    Jesus wept

    You need some sort of industrial job to clean up that amount of crap. Or get that woman off the telly to come round and give a place a good seeing to.

    And another thing - a barbers chair in the bedroom? What kind of filthy pervert are you?

    (where did you get it, just for future information)

    1. Nigel Whitfield.

      I prefer ...

      ... to think of it as "straight acting." My mother once remarked that no one would know I'm gay from the state of my flat.

      As for the barber's chair, I got it from another filthy pervert. But I did see a rather fetching black Belmont one for sale in a second hand place on the Bethnal Green road a few weeks ago.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: I prefer

        Wasn't it the Stately Homo of Great Britain, Quentin Crisp, that never cleaned his flat as he argued after the first few years you don't really notice it getting any worse.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Pint

    NaviBot

    Ebuyer sell a similar type of cleaner for £60 that works better if the photos are anything to go by .And it's got a remote control and charger/timer to annoy the neighbours when you are in the pub

    1. Anonymous Bastard
      Unhappy

      You had my hopes up

      It seems Ebuyer's robot is discontinued, although they do have a fun looking robot arm for £30!

  8. Dick Emery
    Dead Vulture

    Geeks are disgusting!

    And I am one of them! I thought I was the only one that liked to live in a dumpster. I have gadgets galore all over the place but my flat is a mess! Every space is taken up with clutter so cleaning is a problem. The floor area in partcular. I doubt that robot would help much as it would not be able to get to the edges and corners of the room!

    It makes my heart warm to think I am not the only one living in a health hazard, dust mite collecting, fluff (dare I say it? Skin?) and other detritis zone.

    I bet you are single ;)

  9. MathiasW

    I can't believe your flat is that DIRTY!

    Jesus H Christ, the little camera on the poor little machine probably took one look at the mess and tried to drive all the way home to the Samsung factory. "Is that a dustball, or a cat?"

    When you gave the cleaning robot back after testing, did Samsung have to bury it as high level waste?

    You don't need a Samsung cleaning robot, you need the new Husqvarna DXR 310 Robot, which has the added advantage that it can be controlled by bluetooth.

    1. Nigel Whitfield.

      It did try to escape!

      The red cable in one of the photos is an ethernet link that it attempted to ingest in the living room, presumably in an attempt to upload to freedom.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    WTF?

    Good God, man!

    Testing that robot in your apartment is like running a Citroen C1 in the Paris-Dakar rally. I was going to say that you needed to clean, but I've revised my judgment - you need to -move-. Just give up on your deposit, take only things that plug into the wall, and leave. Please.

  11. sledge
    Coffee/keyboard

    I feel violated.

    Sweet Jesus, get yourself a cleaner for a day! Have some pride man. Not much of a shout out for your Dyson either..

  12. frank ly
    Boffin

    Fascinated By The Domestic Lives Of Others

    Nigel, Is that some kind of home made breakout strip, just above the skirting board in the bedroom? (I hope it's not a home made mains splice.)

    1. Nigel Whitfield.

      PBX

      It's a junction box for the phone wiring, which lost its cover somewhere along the way. Probably came from somewhere like Maplin or maybe even Tandy, it was so long ago.

      I used to have (until it died earlier this year) an ISDN pbx with internal analogue extensions. Now the skirting boards are cluttered with a mix of analogue phone lines, thin ethernet, ISDN and even a serial link from the old Wyse 50 that used to live in the kitchen and be used with WordPerfect for Unix.

  13. Anton Ivanov
    Flame

    Roomba knock off for twice the price

    No thanks. I would stick to my faithful iRobot. It managed to keep the house clean throughout building works on an extension. That is probably the ultimate test for a cleaning device.

  14. hi_robb
    WTF?

    I must say...

    That if I ever visit your house, I mustn't forget to wipe my feet on the way OUT...

    Robb

  15. Witty username
    WTF?

    Take off and nuke the apartment from orbit

    If those pictures are anything to go by, its the only way to be sure

  16. AF
    Thumb Up

    +1 for the Roomba

    We've been running an iRobot Roomba at home for nearly a year, and despite my initial sceptiscism it's turned out to be worth the money. We've got laminate downstairs, and on hard surfaces you really notice the tiniest bit of dirt or grit, so scheduling it to run every other day ensures that the floor is always spotless. Once a week I set it off upstairs as well, which is carpeted, and it does an excellent job on that too.

    I think the key thing with robots like these, though, is that they don't need to be as good as a Dyson - they're meant for regular, scheduled cleaning, not a once-a-fortnight deep clean. If you schedule the robot to clean at, say, 9am every day, or every other day if you don't have kids/more than two people in the house, then dust and dirt won't have a chance to build up - it'll only ever be cleaning up light amounts of dirt, which it will do quite happily.

    They're not cheap, but like an e-reader, the convenience factor will make them worthwhile to some people - now if they'd just make one that will do the stairs as well...!

  17. Thomas Swann
    FAIL

    Hmmm

    You better hope Kim and Agie never get hold of you.

    Read Maggie Gee's 'The Ice People' and you will understand that no good can come of domestic cleaning robots.

    First it will be our pets.

    Then it will only be a matter of time before they are hunting us in packs in order to devour our weak flesh.

  18. Anonymous Coward
    Boffin

    hardly a fair test!

    IF you had a robot cleaner it would be out daily or weekly at most. This test is far far more than a weeks dirt buildup!! as for ingrained dirt if its swept daily there wont be anything to walk/work into the grain.

    1. Nigel Whitfield.

      I did point out ...

      ... that the results are quite acceptable in areas with normal levels of dirt, and it'll indeed do a fine job, even with cat hair and some of the other usual domestic detritus.

      But had I not selflessly moved furniture and revealed the monstrous amounts of fluff lurking there, to see how well it coped with that, I'm sure someone would have been along to complain we didn't really put it through its paces.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Thumb Up

        Could have been worse...

        In one of my old flats, when I was living on 70 hour weeks, and weekends, and so couldn't be arsed tidying up, my carpet was fine.

        Because it was covered in detritus, pizza boxes, clothes etc, from where I basically came in the house at 11pm, had a takeaway, crashed to bed, then at 6:30am had a shower and left the house again. The place did end up looking a bit, er, shameful.

        In the end, I decided the best thing to do was to call up a clearance company to help clear out the crap, and then a cleaner to tickle the place over. The advantage of working stupid hours - you never have any one round to see the mess (because you're never at home) and you have plenty of disposable income to pay for cleaners.

        £60 later, you'd never even have known I had lived there, apart from the lingering smell of cigarette smoke and a slightly grubby oven, which I had the moral fibre to deal with myself.

        Repeat every six months or so - professional cleaning services for the win!

        Anon, to save my own shame, as I live a little better now...

        PS: If your dyson seems a little light on suckage, pull the bottom off and clean out the passages, makes a massive difference, if your hoover is treated with as much disdain as your flat ;-)

        PPS: I have now decided that a barber chair would be an excellent idea for my room, but why is everyone suggesting it's pervy? I've always found barbers chairs quite comfy, where's the perv appeal?

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Dead Vulture

    Navibot?

    I saw that in the title and clicked on it based on that, hoping it would be some kind of robotic Neytiri... I am disappointed.

    1. Tony Smith, Editor, Reg Hardware

      Navi-bot

      It's blue - what more d'you want?

  20. Richard Scratcher
    Terminator

    I'm sorry Dave, I can't clean that.

    Poor little Navisod!

    WALL-E's job was a piece of piss by comparison.

  21. Some Beggar
    Paris Hilton

    Dude

    You don't need a robot vac or a human cleaner ... you need to move back in with your mum and be grounded until you learn how to look after yourself.

    Filthier than Paris Hilton.

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