What we all want to know is: Can it deal with stairs?
Video: Dyson unveils robotic tank that hoovers while you're out
Youtube Video Dyson has duly come clean on its new robotic vacuum cleaner today, after teasing the launch in a video last week. The Dyson 360 Eye has come about after 16 years of “intensive R&D”, according to the British firm, and the company reckons it will blow other robotic slave hoovers out of the water. “Most robotic …
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Friday 5th September 2014 13:36 GMT Matt 21
Re: Can it deal with cat poo?
Not a bad point.
I also can't see how it will pull the settee out, pick up my sons dirty socks, shut the door behind it so it can vacuum behind the door, pick the DVDs up off the floor and put them back on the shelf, do the dusting first or shout at the kids to tidy their rooms.
Mind you, on the other hand it probably won't whinge about how it's the only one who does anything in this house..... unless it's called Marvin.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 13:44 GMT MrXavia
Re: A true Roomba competitior..
The roomba is a bit rubbish.... ok for hard floors but not carpets...
I'd say take a look at the LG hombot, best robotic vacuum cleaner i've found, and it IS a real vacuum, not a sweeper like most....
This dyson looks a bit too tall to be practical under low chairs or even low tables...
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Friday 5th September 2014 04:24 GMT Mark 65
Re: A true Roomba competitior..
I just couldn't bring myself to tell people I'd brought a hombot though.
Regarding "The Dyson 360 Eye has come about after 16 years of “intensive R&D”, according to the British firm, and the company reckons it will blow other robotic slave hoovers out of the water."
In terms of price I have zero doubt it will blow everything out of the water including my car.
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Friday 5th September 2014 09:32 GMT Dr. Mouse
Re: A true Roomba competitior..
In terms of price I have zero doubt it will blow everything out of the water including my car.
I may just be blowing hot air (ba da boom, ching) but I think I heard that it was going to cost about £750.
If so, it doesn't quite blow my car (£700) out of the water, but it does beat it.
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Friday 5th September 2014 23:28 GMT N13L5
16 Years of intensive R&D for more than just another vacuum cleaner
"The Dyson 360 Eye has come about after 16 years of “intensive R&D”, according to the British firm, and the company reckons it will blow other robotic slave hoovers out of the water."
For sure, cause a lot of the R&D went into taking continuous 360 video of your house with its EYE, record any conversations and send them back to MI6 and NSA with a scrambled, undetectable, frequency hopping sender that looks like a vacuum cleaner brush.
It can also emit poison gas if intelligence suspects that you've been bad.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 16:14 GMT Tom 38
Re: 420 patent applications
420 patent applications...
"A method of blowing glass to create a system for cooling and diffusing airborne solid and liquid particulates and gasses resulting from combustion of plant matter"
"A method of arranging sheets of gummed rice paper in an innovative fashion in order to create conical tubes of plant matter"
"A method of controlling a heating element in order to keep the contents of a crucible at between 126°C and 186°C in an enclosed container"
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Thursday 4th September 2014 23:56 GMT dan1980
Re: 420 patent applications
@AC
I think Tom's point was that the way you get 420 patents from a vacuum cleaner that uses a bunch of existing concepts, is to split each any every conceivable 'invention' into the smallest possible parts and then describe each of these through several patents covering every aspect of their construction, functionality and design.
And, you do it all in torturously complicated language designed to obscure the fact that what you are describing is completely obvious or simply an overly specific refinement of a pre-existing concept.
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Friday 5th September 2014 15:42 GMT Tom 38
Re: 420 patent applications
I think Tom's point was that the way you get 420 patents from a vacuum cleaner that uses a bunch of existing concepts, is to split each any every conceivable 'invention' into the smallest possible parts
No, it was really just about getting baked. Weekend anyone?
Nuke smoking alien from Mars Attacks! --->
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Friday 5th September 2014 23:45 GMT N13L5
Re: 420 patent applications
I can see how 90% of the money didn't go into the vacuum cleaner but was spent on patent fees and lawyers. I wonder how many engineers quit through this project...
.
Unless, of course ...if it can vacuum up plant matter, combust it, convert it to a gas and spread it all around the room. In that case, they probably all stayed on...
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Thursday 4th September 2014 14:39 GMT dotdavid
Re: I'm a slob...
This. We bought a Roomba a couple of years ago, not to be a main vacuum cleaner (it's basically just a motorised brush) but to sort of help out when it came to pet hair and stuff.
It had enormous problems with our cluttered British home; it was too wide to drive under the table between the chairs, it occasionally would drive onto some toy the cats had been playing with and get stuck, it got lost trying to find its charging station so would leave the job half-done and it had a very small dust-bin so you'd have to empty it frequently anyway. So now it's sitting there gatheri... no I won't go there ;-)
Judging by the Dyson demo video, they're also testing their version in large open spaces so I'm doubtful they've solved the problem.
I love the idea of a vacuum cleaner that is automatic, but I don't think they've really made much progress since my Roomba was released.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 18:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm a slob...
actually, will they play nice with other Dysobots?
An interesting question: in the hypothetical case I would have enough money and would be willing to waste on a number of Dyson bots, would it be possible to reprogram them with fight and evade tactics, augmented with laser "rifles"? Regular hoovering may be improved by Dyson, but it's still a painfully boring thing to watch - much more interesting if they were able to chase each other and do battle in some form. You'd also never know what you'd find when you get back home...
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Thursday 4th September 2014 14:04 GMT MacGuru
sounds neato
My neato vx-21 ( yes the name is off-putting ) laser scans and builds up a picture of the room. Navigates the whole flat and returns to charge, even when I moved the charge bay to another room.
Its vastly superior to the old roomba that was dumber than Adam Sandler movie.. and sucked just as much..
I'm sure the Dyson will be good.. but you can pick up a neato for a lot less..
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Thursday 4th September 2014 14:45 GMT Shawn Grinter
Re: sounds neato
I too have a Neato, fab machine and it *will* do under most tables and sofas - by the look of the Dyson which is much taller I suspect it won't. However the tank tracks look pretty cool and deffo better than the Neato wheels which occasionally get stuck.
Mind you if the Dyson say "Exterminate" I'm buying one regardless :-)
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Thursday 4th September 2014 21:42 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: sounds neato
Neato...*will* do under most tables and sofas"
I've seen a few people mentioning that. Every sofa I've ever owned and the vast majority of the ones I've seen have an inch or two clearance above floor level. Unless a lot of people have 1930's wooden legged sofas or modernistic chrome tube things then I'm not sure how Neato or Roomba manage to clean underneath them
Personally, I prefer nice big soft sofas I can slouch properly on without it reminding me of the doctors couch ;-). Also handy for when you need small change in a hurry. If there's none down the back of the cushions, there's sure to be some on the floor underneath where no vacuum cleaner dares to suck!
Anyway, I do like the look of the Dyson robot, even though I know it could never cope in our house.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 15:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: sounds neato
"My neato vx-21 ( yes the name is off-putting ) ...."
Well Dyson have messed up calling a vacuum cleaner a "360 eye". If it's got tracks then they should have called it the Dyson Kursk, and given the design a suitable khaki theme. And they could have offered an expensive version with metal tracks, deliberately devoid of lubricant in order to move with a menacing squeaking and clanking (and an extra cost option of a built in speaker playing a quiet soundtrack of a 26 litre diesel). I'd have one of those.
Of course, the marketing dweebs who specified it have no imagination and probably no knowledge of history, so none of that was ever on the cards, but they could at least have called it the Dyson Panther, which has pleasant overtones of grace, speed and strength amongst those who don't have a Commando war comic moment when the term "Panther" gets mentioned.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 19:16 GMT Phil Endecott
Re: sounds neato
I also have a Neato. It's great, but I think we're probably a couple of generations from widespread use. The neato cleans well (and the recent stories about 1600W cleaners made me laugh - if this can manage on battery power, how can anyone need 1600W?). But no it can't pick up socks, it will tanlge on wires (and pull phones off shelves), and it won't get close to walls or corners. Actually this has made me a more tidy person than I was before - it has trained me! I certainly prefer to spend a few seconds picking things up and maybe moving furniture a bit, rather than actually pushing a hoover around. As a result my house is both tidier and cleaner than it was before.
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Friday 5th September 2014 00:30 GMT Persiflage
Re: sounds neato
Another vote for the Neato here. Thing is incredible... and it navigates with FRIKKIN' LASER BEAMS! Seriously, Dyson's 360-degree eyes are creepy-sounding (recalling, to my mind at least, certain childhood nightmares about my primary-school teachers who claimed similarly ubiquitous ocularity) and lame by comparison. If it had laser eye-beams, I might rethink, but just "eyes"? Meh. And it's too tall; it won't get under the furniture like the Neato can. That little baby is great, and copes well with random stuff left scattered around.
The biggest drawback of the Dyson, though, is that it doesn't appear to be a form factor that will appeal to cats. If it's too tall and narrow for cats to choose as a perching spot, it loses automatically in the cute-video stakes... Clearly this is an important factor, as cat-related photogenicity was basically all the Roomba had going for it, and look how well it sold.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 16:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: ... so the same as the Electrolux Trilobite then...
yeah we were looking for a washing machine about 10 years ago and ask in the store about the Dyson, was told to avoid and get a siemens or meile. We got the siemens and its still going strong 10 years later. Although I expect it to break soon as it came with a 10 year, YES that's a 10 year warranty, which has just expired!
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Thursday 4th September 2014 17:11 GMT Down not across
Re: ... so the same as the Electrolux Trilobite then...
Anyone remember the Dyson washing machine?
Yes. I had the CR01. It was actually very good washing machine. And at the time the only one with a large door and a large drum. Dyson's customer service for that was second to none. They kept upgrading the firmware and replacing all kinds of bits for no charge. Sadly in the end it succumbed to the drum rusting (yeah the split drum had a serious issue with that) and eventually seizing up. And the drum was from third party and the only part they no longer were able to replace due to no drums being available.
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Friday 5th September 2014 11:51 GMT bonkers
Re: ... so the same as the Electrolux Trilobite then...
Dyson Airblade hand-dryer
Sounds better in a Glaswegian accent
"how's the earbleed technology getting on"
seriously I've never heard anything quite as loud, especially in the high frequencies, its easy for the hands to operate as whistles well into the 10's of kHz. It sounds to me a lot more damaging than the live performance SPL limits.
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Saturday 6th September 2014 00:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Sy Borg
Your teenage daughter's favorite tune is Zappa's song "Crew slut" ...and I suppose you introduced her to it :p
At any rate, I thought that song had long since passed from what little public exposure it had, since its was successfully kept out of any of his "best of" compilations, not to mention that such lyrics just don't fly in the United States...
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Thursday 4th September 2014 14:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still missing critical feature
"Non of these robot vacuums empty their bins out requiring daily human interaction. I have given up on such robot until this has been implemented."
A software fix should enable it to identify the cat flap, reverse up to the flap and engage reverse thrust? Admittedly it'll make a mess outside until the wind blows, but I can tolerate that.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 18:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still missing critical feature
A software fix should enable it to identify the cat flap, reverse up to the flap and engage reverse thrust? Admittedly it'll make a mess outside until the wind blows, but I can tolerate that.
And you have a 360° camera to ensure it only does that when the cat is well within range..
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Thursday 4th September 2014 15:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Still missing critical feature
If the experience I've had, and that of quite a few people I know, emptying the bin shouldn't be a problem with a Dyson product, it'll have broken before the bin is full.
Admittedly these reliability issues were a few years ago, we all bought non-Dyson vacuums after our collective experiences. Maybe their more reliable now?
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Thursday 4th September 2014 18:45 GMT Tanuki
Re: Still missing critical feature
Here at Scrotum Towers cleaning duties are performed by a German-made "Sebo". It was bought after a quick chat with my machine-room contract-cleaning provider-of-the-month. I weorked on the basis that if you're paid a fixed amount to do a job you'll want tools that let you complete it in the shortest-possible time so you can pay your minimum-wage cleandroids the least-possible.
So far the Sebo's been brilliant.
[His other cleaner suggestion was a Nilfisk-Advance - which I have to admit looked truly impressive in a kind of Android-brothel-meets-LEXX-shiny-stainless-steel-machine-porn-fantasy-sense but I just couldn't justify spending £1500 on something that would spend 99% of its life unseen and shut away in the cellar].
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Thursday 4th September 2014 14:35 GMT Truth4u
Could it work in a real home though?
We don't all have spacious showroom fresh homes. The homes they use to promote vacuum cleaners are already clean, and so spacious and empty, obviously no one lives there anyway.
How would this cope with silly things like, I dunno, socks on the ground, plugs on the ground, coat hangers, cables, litter, empty beer bottles, towels etc?
I don't know about you but before I vacuum, it is not optional to pick up the crap on the floor first.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 17:51 GMT Truth4u
Re: Could it work in a real home though?
These machines also love a roll of anything:
. bog paper
. string
. ribbon
Almost anything that has a loose end is gunna be wrapped around the brush spindle.
It's these little things that completely ruin the idea of a vacuuming robot. Its very simplistic to just assume everything on the floor of an average home is dust. People can sometimes have belongings in their house.
Without any attachments for manual use, you would have to own a robot vacuum, and a real vacuum cleaner as well, or go back to the dust pan and brush maybe?
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Thursday 4th September 2014 14:42 GMT TeamEvil
I have an "XR advanced vacuum cleaning robot" £160 from Amazon. Fair play to it, the bloody thing is fantastic. Wakes up at 6am every day, trundles around a carpeted room for 2 hours and genuinely keeps the carpets clean. The dust bucket needs emptying every other day and is normally full of Mutt hair and dust.
It may not be the most intelligent robot, but for the price I have no complaints at all.
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Sunday 7th September 2014 15:16 GMT Michael Wojcik
Wakes up at 6am every day, trundles around a carpeted room for 2 hours and genuinely keeps the carpets clean.
In two hours or thereabouts I can vacuum every room in my house (~2300 ft2, 215 m2), and get a bit of exercise in the process. I honestly don't see the benefit of one of these robot-vacuum things.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 14:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Roomba replacement?
It looks good. It has some features that seem better than my Roomba - the tank tracks in particular, since my Roomba sometimes fails to make it up the 1cm step into the kitchen.
Still, it will be hard to beat my Roomba. It's so dumb that it can handle everything - it will keep bumbling around until the downstairs is done, so it doesn't matter if I've moved a chair or if there's a shoe that it keeps bumping around.
The Roomba's cleaning ability is pretty poor in comparison to my proper vacuum cleaner, but then it does it 3 times a week vs once in a blue moon with my proper one, so it adds up to being better.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 15:29 GMT A Known Coward
Can it move furniture?
Well? Can it move the chair and bin out from under the desk to vacuum there? Can it pick up the laundry basket or the rugs so as not to choke to death on the frilly edge? Can it climb stairs or clean beneath the cushions on the sofa? Well of course it can't, so you'll need to go around after it with a second vacuum cleaner to do all the bits that it missed.
I guess if you've got lots of money and little time for chores then it's a great idea. But if you've got the money why wouldn't you pay someone to come in and clean instead? It creates a job in this country instead of China and a human being has none of these limitations, plus they can do whole load of other jobs too.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 15:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
And in the real world?
You know, the one where gaps between chairs and walls are 100mm or less, where power cables snake over the floor, where the TV stand is only 50mm off the floor, ... These things may be great if your home is in the US Midwest with minimalist rooms the size of a tennis court, but here in Blighty houses are small, cramped and inevitably messy. What's needed is a more like a fleet of hyperactive cleaners each the size of a mouse, that return for an automatic dump and recharge every 15 minutes..
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Thursday 4th September 2014 16:03 GMT Coofer Cat
10 years later...
I remember Dyson saying the were coming out with a robotic vacuum cleaner over 10 years ago. It was going to be called the DC06 (I even found a link from 2004 here: http://www.gizmag.com/go/1282/). Thankfully, they've pulled it down from the £1000 proposed price tag. I expect this'll be rather good (although probably noisy).
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Thursday 4th September 2014 17:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
I'm sorry
but if the 360 camera is not IP enabled and we can't have a "Some perv hacked my hoover" Daily Fail story then I'm not interested.
"I could not work out why it was always cleaning the bathroom when I was in the shower or doing my spray tan" 23 year old Alesha (picture below) from Rayleigh explained. “I would not have minded but it was really wearing my rug out”.
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Saturday 6th September 2014 10:16 GMT Truth4u
Re: To contrast that...
I blame business dicks like the ones on Dragons Den UK.
Guy walks in with the best idea ever, they all say they love it and they all want one blah blah blah, then they get to the bit where they ask if he patented it and when he says no they basically tell him to fuck off and the rest of the show is just them giving him a drubbing for not having patents and saying what a shit he is to even think of wasting their time.
They basically don't give a rats ass about business, they're just looking for someone who already has a license to print money, so they can screw him out of half his company.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 20:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
After sales support
I will say this for Dyson - Their after sales support is the best I have ever dealt with and their refurbished equipment which you can buy through their site far cheaper than retail is reported to be more reliable than shop bought - one of my friends is an engineer with them and whilst the main production is fairly automated / stock parts, etc, refurbs are dealt with by a single, highly qualified engineer who checks the entire system over, replaces the faulty parts and any parts with reasonable wear.
I got a Dyson Animal something or other for £90, saved a small fortune and it's been great.
So, yeah, this might be a bit of marketing hype, but at least you know if you buy it you wont go wrong with the company and the support they offer.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 20:39 GMT Alan Brown
Dyson deleted my comments
1: 12cm is too tall
2: Tiny bin, Karcher solved that with the RC3000
3: Anyone not using air recirculation technology on a low power cleaner is silly. It can save 90% on power consumption.
To see why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d7LCRvNOOg
website at http://www.g0cwt.co.uk/arc/new_page_3.htm
Nice side benefit: it means fine dust isn't sprayed into the air.
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Thursday 4th September 2014 20:54 GMT smartypants
I like Dyson. Am I mad?
I know there's a lot of leg-pulling on here, but I feel a bit uncomfortable when I see people taking the pee out of ground-breaking designs that didn't succeed in the end (in this case the Dyson washing machine). It was hugely innovative, and when you innovate, there's a risk you'll fail.
I like Dyson's approach to taking ordinary items and trying to make them better. I like their fearless optimism on display as they wade into staid, established markets and disrupt them with genuine innovation. We could do with a few more Dysons knocking around Blighty.
Actually, they probably are out there now... but haven't struck gold yet. Don't listen to the sniggerers! Carry on! Do something, and let's hope it's a spectacular success!
In short, to do is to be!
P.S. In my fervour I forgot to say that I won't buy a robotic cleaner. Maybe I like the misery...especially the stairs for some reason. (I get to use the special attachments)
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Friday 5th September 2014 07:18 GMT Stacy
Not of fan of Dyson anyway, but even so I don't see this one being very good
Expensive and they really don't work on wooden floors at all (in my limited experience watching my in laws Dyson push the crums around the room in front of the brush instead of hovering it up) and never having a good explaination as to why they are better than the 4 times cheaper vacuums that work perfectly on the same surface from the sales people desperate to sell you something for hundreds of euros instead of 80.
But this just puzzels me. The point of a robot vacuum is that you can use it when it's not in your way, like 3am for our Roomba, if this dyson sees it's way around the room instead of using the infra red / mapping technique that the roomba (watching it slow down for obsticles it knows about, and circling table legs it knows about is quite cool) has how does it cope with a pitch black room?
Also, the roomba goes underneath our sofas, tables and our sons play pen and cleans under small legs with the side brush - something that I can't see on dyson so the edges of the room will be missed.
And is about 1/3 of the price.
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Friday 5th September 2014 09:19 GMT GrizzlyCoder
Simplest answer: do not harbour animals in your dwelling then there won't be hairs all over the floor. THEN incorporate the 'manual chore' (hah! tell that to (for example, not the only one) native Africans beating clothes on rocks to clean them and see them laugh at your 'chores') of pushing a machine around the floor into your daily Wii-moderated exercise regime. FFS people get real -- if bits on the floor bother you that much that you need a robot to pick them up every day then stop being so sloppy in your daily life or just get used to it and sort it yourself once a week. Jeez.
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Friday 5th September 2014 17:37 GMT Zot
I would like to know a couple of things...
A) Does it collect the dimensions of people's homes and sell it off to the highest bidding data farmer?
B) The advert implies that it's all effortless and quiet, and we all know that Dyson's scream like mini jet engines. So how loud is it and does it scare animals silly?
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Monday 8th September 2014 00:18 GMT Infernoz
James Dyson is right, other robot vacuums are tiresome jokes.
I had a Roomba, I wore quickly, clogged easily, and eventually broke and they got more expensive, so it wasn't replaced.
So for the Dyson 360 Eye:
* It really is damned tall so will not go under furniture which other robot vacuums can.
* What is the cleaning time between recharges?
* Will it be affordable?
* It better be affordable, because the price of the latest battery hand vacuums and their short cleaning time seriously takes the piss, as do the O fans!