You can create room dividers in open layouts to better separate seating and dining areas, and drop in furniture to tell it what to expect in certain spaces. The in-app AI also tried to add furniture during some of the mapping, but it wasn’t accurate.
The 2D map is the main one that you’ll edit and see detailed info for, but you can also look at it in 3D. The 3D map version was hilarious, since many random objects were shown visually as a toilet (including the X30 Ultra’s own base station); I didn’t find it nearly as useful as the 2D.
Editing the map within the app wasn’t as intuitive as I would have liked, but once I got the hang of the tools, it was easy enough to customize it with room labels, separation for more targeted cleaning, and types of flooring. In the map you’ll also see an option for zones, where you can draw a zone box for specific area cleaning.
Get in Swirl Formation
Photograph: Nena Farrell
The X30 Ultra did a good job moving around all kinds of objects and from various carpet and flooring heights. It even managed to navigate through the tricky legs of my toddler’s high chair and my vintage dining table’s C-shaped legs. It had a little trouble figuring out my living room rug, though; I ended up using zones to focus on my rug so it could vacuum in a timely fashion. Otherwise, it was constantly on a mission to get into the smallest crevices it could, bless its little digital soul.
The robot did fine vacuuming up things like Cheerios, cat food, and cat litter, but it never got 100 percent of it. That’s pretty normal with robot vacuums, but a little disappointing given how high the price tag is. For example, it doesn’t do edges as well as you might expect; there was still a little litter on the edges of the hall, which is what the flex arm promised to fix.
Overall, it’s a pretty great hybrid robot vacuum and mop, and I love being able to leave the damp mop pads off my carpet. But it’s a steep price tag for the removable mop pad and that flex arm, which didn’t even work that well. You’d have to really want those to make the vacuum worth it (or have a massive home that requires the X30’s long battery life). Otherwise, the rest of these features can be found in cheaper vacuums.