Gadgetory

I'm Natali Morris and we're gonna take a first look today at the new iRobot line of products now iRobot are the robots that clean your floors so there are little robotic vacuum cleaners i love them i use them at home all the time this is nancy smith she's with iRobot thank you for bringing by your little robot machine my pleasure so you have a new line of scuba and a new line of rumba now let's go over what each one of them do the rumba is a vacuum cleaner so it's not going to pick up stay it's not going to scrub your floors at all it's just going to pick up we have a little mess here and it does seem like an organized mess but we did kind of grind them into the carpet so we can really put it to the test because this is not for organized message right this is for real life messes that's right the whole idea behind our robots they work in real-life situations so put it down in your home push a button and let it go and it figures it out the next day you can pick it up and bring it to your neighbor's house if you're real nice put it down in their house and work their great too so it's gonna work real life situations in your home cleaning up whatever you're putting down okay so we've got some Cheerios here it's funny that you're encouraging sharing that you buy one for the whole neighborhood right it's the only robot you bring out at a dinner party you know so you'll you'll be cleaning up beforehand make a little message and show people how your robot works it's a crowd-pleaser let me tell you and a Christmas gift that just keeps on giving so okay let's put it to the test we have cheerios here it's the easiest system ever it just goes down and then looks for the dirt itself right well so what it does is it tries to figure out the size of space cleaning as it goes we're doing a little rumba soccer here because we have a mess the robot doesn't see dirt in front of it but it sees dirt underneath it so there you go that's good it's going to go ahead and you'll see the path that's cleaning it's going to clean around your shoe if you leave it there it has sensors that can find edges and clean around edges so right now it's finding some dirty area clean right over those Cheerios both the crushed up and the whole which is really nice so it picks up large objects as well as small and the idea here is that the robot will clean an area of your floor three to five times before it's done and then it will go back and charge itself and be ready to go again the next day okay that's pretty amazing because it did in fact let's turn it off for a second it did in fact pick up all the cheerio in the debris there's some that we really embedded into the carpet here with my stiletto shoe so it's going to need to come back and do that again that's right the whole idea is that it will get that area again and again and so just like when you vacuum you don't go over an area once you need to cover it multiple times and our robot will get it three to five times before shuts itself off okay one of the big things in my house especially is a hair because I shed a lot of hair especially just having had a baby you know that you shed a lot of hair so um the hair gets wrapped around the bottom let's talk a little bit about that the robot has these two counter-rotating brushes that pick up a lot of hair and it's great because it actually pulls the hair out of the carpet so it does a great job picking it up but in the past sometimes the hair would actually wrap around too much so you had to clean that very frequently our new vacuum actually has an ability to pull some of that hair off it's called arrow vac and so it's pulling a lot of the hair off of the brushes and putting it back into the bin so that it cuts down on any wear and tear people who own room was before I've complained about that and this is a great fix for the new version right it tends to be a big pain in the butt so that now you can just catch her all the hair in this plastic thing right and then you just pull that out and dump that in the trash that's right we also now have hepatitis on it which was a new feature for the Roomba for the 700 series and then tell me a little bit about the the timer as well sure this robot has the ability to be scheduled so you can schedule it up to seven times so you can have it go every day at noon time while you're at work or you can have it at different times of the day if that works better for you and so it's very convenient you don't even have to think about maintaining your floors okay and then the same sensor technology where you can cordon off areas of your house that is correct there is however a new sensor in some of our 700 series the higher ends have a new dirt detect sensor which is very cool the current one has a sensor that will detect fine particulate so it actually here's the dirt the new ones actually also have a optical sensors they can see dirt underneath it that's might be lighter so hair like you're talking about if you have a pet that sleeps in a certain area and there's a lot of hair there you want the robot to spend more time there so the new higher end 700 series will do that okay and then you use these tiny little sensors to say don't go past this room right correct so they're called virtual walls and you can set them up in the robot will actually ping them and turn them on and won't go past them but it also also has its own sensors built in like natural sensors like cliffs so it won't fall down stairs don't have to worry about blocking those off or anything that's so great okay very good and when does this come out and how much can we expect it sure those are coming out the end of this in the middle of q1 so if you go online to a robot calm and you can be updated as to when those will be available and the price range is in for 50 and up okay all right it's an expensive gift but let me tell you if you hate washing floors and sweeping as much as I do it's it's an investment worth looking into okay now let's talk about the new scuba this is about half the size of the original scuba so it's a lot smaller and again I use this in my house and one of the big complaints is that it don't it doesn't get into the corners of the house so now it's smaller for made four corners it is made for tight spaces absolutely one of the biggest comments we got back from people's they wanted it to clean their bathrooms nobody likes cleaning bathrooms I don't like lady matters right who likes that so the scuba in its original form was 13 inches in diameter too big to fit around toilets and around pedestal sinks and things and so this nice small compact shape allows it to get into those tight areas and do a great job cleaning okay so let's go ahead and we put some coffee down and i'm not sure if our cameras can pick up but this is a blue gatorade here it could also be Windex but you say that this is not for really recent spills so i wouldn't spill my coffee and then send the scuba over i would wipe it up with a paper towel and then send the school for the stains right you see that coffee stain was dried on and it just did a great job lifting it and again the idea here is that does the multiple pass we've always found that the longer the robot runs and it can actually leave a little bit of water behind that actually loosens up stains because there's water and cleaning solution the great thing about these is that they're always putting down clean solution and water and picking up the dirty water so you're never washing with dirty water now at use you have you suggest certain types of cleaning solution but you can also use vinegar right on our traditional Scoob as you can use white vinegar which is great for hardwood floors absolutely alright and tell us a little bit more about the the bits and pieces underneath now that we've seen it clean up this coffee that will turn it up upside down so this robot is very easy to fill which was another piece of feedback that we had so it's just fill here and empty here so there's a water containment system in here that gets larger the clean water gets filled up and as it's dirty water it's filling the empty space with the dirty water so again they never meet on the bottom here what we have is a plate that it uses to scrub the floor and then suck up the dirty water this plate is removable and washable which is very important in our testing because if I use this in my bathroom I don't want it to go in my kitchen yeah for obvious gross reasons yes exactly so the idea here that you can take these off wash them and reuse them or you can switch them out as need be so that's very nice it's very compact as you saw and the wheels this has a much lower threshold because it's not made to go on carpets so you want to keep it on the hard surfaces anything sealed it's great for all right and you also mentioned that the battery life is longer for these as well on the Roomba the battery life has been increased by fifty percent and so the idea is that you can one of the other uses people we've thought people going to use it once a week when we first came out with them but they're using them two to three times a week sometimes seven days a week so the battery life and with any rechargeable battery we try to improve it all the time so this actually will last longer okay and we can see this again in q1 and for how much that's correct for 299 this robot will be available on our website very good well thank you very much these are very fun little gadgets I'm glad to have got to put them to the test you