The Best gets even Better

Last year, I reviewed the ECOVACS Deebot X1 Omni and absolutely loved that robot vacuum. The only real downside with that robot vacuum was the price. It did literally everything else you could want from a robot vacuum. This included a dock that could empty the dustbin, refill the water reservoir and even clean the mops (as well as dry them). Fast-forward to this year, and ECOVACS is back with a sequel, the Deebot X2 Omni, which does a lot of the same things, but better.

One of the bigger changes this year is that the robot vacuum is actually not a square, reminding me of the vacuums from Neato (which has since ceased operations). Which helps it get into corners better and also get out of the way when you’re not using it.

Now given all of these details, the question about the Deebot X2 Omni is going to be – is it worth the $1,500 asking price? Well, let’s find out in our full review here.

ECOVACS Deebot X2 Omni Review: Design

Let’s start with the design of the robot vacuum itself, and then we’ll move onto the dock. The robot vacuum itself is shaped like a squircle, which looks rather unique, and different from other robot vacuums on the market. Now the reason for this is to allow the vacuum to get into corners better, and edge clean rooms better. Along with this, there is still a rotating brush in the front that will loosen the dirt, with the two rolling brushes that will suck it up. ECOVACS, like most of the competition, has moved onto using a rubber roller system. But interestingly, ECOVACS is not using a dual-roller system here. Instead, the roller is much larger than the competition.

When you combine that larger roller with the 8,000Pa suction, the Deebot X2 Omni is able to do a really good job of cleaning your home. But on more on that in the next section. Towards the back of the bottom of the vacuum, are two mops. These are not the same mopping pads that most other robot vacuums have, these are actual mops. Allowing the Deebot X2 Omni to really scrub and clean your floors with ease. Which also explains why the dock is able to clean and dry these mops – to prevent bacteria of course.

On the sides, you’ll mostly just find different sensors, including the dual-LiDAR setup. Which works really well for navigating around your home. It also has two cameras on the front from AIVI 3D, which allows it to avoid objects in your home, and even pet waste. On the back, there’s a couple of contacts for when the vacuum is charging, and that’s also how it refills the water reservoir. Interestingly, there’s no user-accessible water reservoir on this model. Only a user-accessible dust bin.

On the top, you’ll see a big power button, which is in the shape of a Y, this is likely having to do with their personal assistant called Yiko. But you can easily take off the cover, and this is how you will get access to the dustbin, as well as a power button and the WiFi reset button. Honestly, after setting it up for the first time, I did not have to remove the cover at all. So this is something you’ll really never need to do.

The design of the robot vacuum by itself is quite impressive to say the least. It’s more slim-line than other robot vacuums on the market, while not really removing anything from the vacuum. Keeping the water reservoir inside the vacuum and not able to be removed is an interesting choice, but that might allow ECOVACS to make that reservoir larger than normal. Since I have a smaller place, with fewer non-carpeted rooms, it never really ran out of water for cleaning.

The dock is beautiful and functional

I honestly, never thought I’d say this about a robot vacuum dock, but it’s a pretty beautiful looking dock. Now the reason for spending so much time on the design of a dock, is so that people will want to have it in their living room, kitchen, or wherever they decide to keep it. Companies like ECOVACS are trying to make them look really nice, so they aren’t hidden and are actually used.

ECOVACS does offer the Deebot X2 Omni in both black and white. I do have the black one here, but the white one on their website does look pretty nice. And I definitely wouldn’t mind getting that one either.

The dock hasn’t changed a whole lot from the X1 Omni actually. You have a drawer in the middle that has the all the dirt from the dustbin, in a dustbag. And when you open the top, you’ll find two containers. One is clear and the other is darker. The clear one is for the clean water to clean the mops and also refill the water reservoir. While the other is the dirty water, from after cleaning the mops. It is important to empty the dirty water pretty often, otherwise, it can really start to stink.

But that’s not all. There’s a metal strip near the top of the dock. Which has a button for the vacuum. This button can be pressed to stop or start cleaning, without needing to bend down and press the button on the vacuum. It’s a small thing, but it really does make a nice difference here. There’s also a LED light that goes along the right side of this strip, and this indicates a few different things, like the Deebot X2 Omni charging, or Yiko listening to you for commands. Yes, this robot vacuum has it’s own personal assistant. Why? I’m not sure. I actually ended up turning it off, because it kept triggering falsely.

ECOVACS Deebot X2 Omni Review: Cleaning experience

These days, most robot vacuums are pretty good at cleaning up your home. Some might have other features that make it work better, but for the most part, they do a great job. Now when you jump up to a $1,500 robot vacuum, you’d expect that it is able to clean well enough that you never need to vacuum yourself, and that might be true. That will depend on your home, people and pets that live there and such.

But for me, and my experience, I have not needed to pull out the actual vacuum at all, since I received the Deebot X2 Omni. Now I did use a regular stick vacuum to clean a mess upstairs because I didn’t feel like carrying the robot vacuum upstairs and then back downstairs when it was finished.

With 8,000Pa suction included, this robot vacuum can really clean very well. Getting up dirt, dust and other debris that might be tracked pretty well into your carpet. Just to give you an idea of how wild that suction is. Roborock’s highest rated suction on a robot vacuum is about 6,000Pa on the S8 Pro Ultra. iRobot maxes out at about 3,000Pa. So this is a huge jump and is currently the best on the market. It’s actually really close to and in some instances exceeds, what a regular stick vacuum or upright vacuum can do. So that’s really impressive.

Mopping is fantastic

Mopping is also quite good here. Like the competition, ECOVACS has made it possible for the Deebot X2 Omni to actually lift the mop, when it gets onto carpet. It is going to intelligently lift the mop, which is actually new to the X2 Omni. Over on the X1 Omni, you’d need to remove the mops to clean the carpet. Which was one of my biggest annoyances. Thankfully, I was using that before I moved and in my old apartment, it was about 85% laminate flooring. So this wasn’t as big of a deal. Now in my current house, it’s flipped, being about 90% carpet.

ECOVACS has included its OZMO Turbo 2.0 rotating mopping system on the X2 Omni, and I’m always quite impressed with how well this does with mopping. It provides consistent pressure on the floor to deep clean. It can also scrub pretty nicely. With AI, ECOVACS is also able to see what needs more scrubbing, automatically. And take care of it. Leaving even less work for the user.

To test this out, I spilled some ketchup on the floor in the kitchen and let it dry. Then let the ECOVACS Deebot X2 Omni loose on it. Surprisingly, it did a really good job on the first pass-through. But it continued to work on it, until it was all gone. It was really impressive. And on top of that, when it went back to the dock to clean the mops, it did a great job of getting them nice and clean. You can’t even tell it cleaned up dried ketchup now.

If you’re like me and don’t have a lot of spaces that need mopping, then the ECOVACS Deebot X2 Omni does seem like overkill, but it is nice to have. I have it running in the basement quite often – which is not carpeted at all. And it’s great to see the basement staying nice and clean. Especially since my home office is down there.

AIVI 3D 2.0 does a great job at avoiding things

A feature that has become quite popular in recent years is the ability to avoid obstacles and also identify them. This used to be the achilles-heel for robot vacuums, as it would run over a charging cord and be stuck. Or it would run over pet waste and smear it all over the home. There are plenty of horror stories about that all over TikTok and Twitter.

With AIVI 3D 2.0, it uses the dual-LiDAR system and dual cameras to identify objects that the robot vacuum might see on the floor in your home, and avoid them. It can also identify furniture. For instance, on the floor plan for my first floor, it does show the couch that’s against the wall. Which is rather neat.

With AI and machine learning work really well with these systems. Some still do have issues and get stuck. But surprisingly, I’ve had zero issues with this new and improved system from ECOVACS. I’ve not had to go rescue it at all. It has been able to avoid shoes, cords, dog toys and more. There is an option in settings to tell ECOVACS that you do have a pet, so it can look out for pet waste. However, it usually labels dog toys as pet waste, and obviously, that’s not true. But it still avoids it, so mission accomplished I guess.

Deebot X2 Omni is noisy, but quiet at the same time

This part is a little hard to explain. The Deebot X2 Omni is a tad on the noisy side. But when you compare it to other robot vacuums, it’s actually about the same level of noise, if not a bit quieter. Before reviewing the Deebot X2 Omni, I was using the Roborock S8 Pro Ultra everyday, and the difference in noise was pretty considerable. However, ECOVACS is also about 25% more powerful on the suction. So it was actually a bit surprising to me.

Obviously, you can somewhat combat the noise here by lowering the vacuum power. Which, if you’re on laminate or tile flooring, it doesn’t need to be at Max+ anyways. But it is something worth considering.

Honestly, the noise should not deter you. It’s really not that much more noisy than any other recent robot vacuum. So if you were thinking about picking up this one, don’t let the noise be the reason why you don’t.

ECOVACS Deebot X2 Omni Review: App experience

Honestly, the app isn’t my favorite for a robot vacuum. I’m much more in favor of how easy-to-use iRobot’s robot vacuum app is to use. It doesn’t give you a ton of options, and just has buttons to clean front-and-center. Then you have Roborock which gives you every option under the sun. ECOVACS is nicely in the middle.

So when you first open the app, you will see your robot vacuum, there’s a down arrow to choose a different one if you do have multiple ones in your home. From there you can see the usual things like whether it is online, what the battery percentage is, and you can also choose to have it start auto-cleaning or go back to the charger. And finally, you can enter to control your robot, or check out the video manager. The cameras on the front do record while it is cleaning, so you can see what your pets do. It’s a pretty cool feature that a lot of robot vacuums have these days actually.

Once you’re into controlling the robot vacuum, it does basically everything that you’d expect from a robot vacuum. This includes showing you a map of the floor it is on. Keep in mind that the Deebot X2 Omni is able to remember multiple floors. And once it is moved to a new floor, it can figure out which floor it is on.

Another cool aspect to these floor plans is that you can customize them. So right now, I have it mapped out for my main floor of my townhouse and my basement. In the basement, I don’t really need it to have the Max+ vacuum suction since it is a concrete floor. So I have it set to standard, which is quieter, and not quite as powerful. You can also change the water level, to low, medium or high for mopping.

ECOVACS will also give you a nice log of how it’s been cleaning. You can see whether it was a whole house cleaning or just an area that was being cleaned. As well as how much it cleaned and how long it took. I’ve noticed that the more it cleans, the faster it gets. This is likely due to there being less dirt and dust when it cleans everyday, but it’s also learning the floor plan each time it runs.

This is a pretty smart robot vacuum

It wouldn’t be a robot vacuum in 2023, without some smart features, right? And ECOVACS has you covered there. There’s a section in the settings for “Smart Cleaning”. This has a number of features, but one that is really interesting is the “Continuous cleaning”. The app says that “DEEBOT will adjust its charging time based on the remaining workload and resume unfinished cleaning tasks”. This is not something I was able to try out, since each floor is pretty small in a townhouse, so it’s usually finished before it needs to go and recharge. But if you have a larger home, this could be very useful.

The robot vacuum also has Do Not Disturb, which basically lets you set your robot vacuum to do not disturb so that it doesn’t start running in the middle of the night. Whether that be from a scheduled cleaning or continuous cleaning. Now this is not something that’s happened to me in quite a few years, but it is good to see this feature available.

A couple other smart features here include Auto-Boost Suction, which is pretty self-explainable. Basically, the vacuum will automatically activate max vacuum power if it detects that it is on carpet. And finally, AIVI 3D 2.0. I’d recommend everyone turn this on, as it is used to avoid and identify obstacles in your home.

The app experience is pretty good, still easy to use and lots of settings that you can use to get the most out of your robot vacuum.

Should you buy the ECOVACS Deebot X2 Omni?

The Deebot X1 Omni was already one of my favorite robot vacuums of the past two years. Because it does so many things, and does them all quite well. Now with the X2 Omni, ECOVACS has upped the game, pretty significantly The upgrade to 8,000Pa has been huge, especially for someone that has a dog that never stops shedding. There’s always dog hair that needs to be picked up, and the Deebot X2 Omni does a great job with that. As well as mopping.

The only real downside here is the price. It’s pretty steep at $1,500, making it one of the more expensive robot vacuums on the market. Which means that before you decide to buy this robot vacuum, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself. And really weigh if the convenience of not having to vacuum and mop your home are worth having a robot vacuum that costs $1,500. I mean, I have a MacBook Air M2 and that is a few hundred bucks cheaper than this robot vacuum.

Now would I buy this robot vacuum? Yes. The convenience factor alone is worth it. The fact that I can just schedule this robot vacuum to clean everyday and keep my home clean, is a big deal. And it requires me lifting zero fingers.