Is the Dreame X50 Ultra robot vacuum worth its high price?

Pros

• Vacuums and mops.
• Cleans and dries its own mop pads.
• Lifts mop heads to avoid carpet.
• Has detachable magnetic mop heads for vacuuming long-pile carpet.
• Has extendable brushes and mop head to clean closer to corners and edges.
• Can climb thresholds up to 60mm high.
• Has remote-camera access and control.
• Offers voice-activated cleaning.
• Has a fully featured app.
• Its water tanks are easy to fill and empty.
• The Lidar ‘periscope’ retracts to improve access under low furniture.
• Provides convenient cleaning short-cuts that are easy to set up and use.

Cons

• Priced at $3,499!
• Navigation can sometimes be illogical.
• The dock uses disposable dust bags.
• Has a large dock.

Features

The Dreame X50 Ultra robot vacuum has pretty much every feature you can think of! It’s a hybrid robot vacuum cleaner that mops and vacuums. It can:

• wash and dry its own mop pads (referred to as ‘dehydrating’ in the app)
• empty its bin
• ‘leap’ over 6cm thresholds
• extend its brush and mop pad to get into edges and corners better
  
• detangle hair from its dual brushes.
  

Plus, it’s got a fully featured app that has every option you can think of.

Even though Dreame is the new kid on the block, it’s been taking notes and has done its research to deliver a capable bot.

The massive dock contains two large water tanks. One is for clean water and the other for the dirty water that is collected after the machine has washed its mop pads. These tanks have large carry handles and are easy to empty and refill.

There is a removeable tank for adding floor cleaner concentrate (with a bottle supplied), and the dock also houses the auto-empty dust bag. Dreame states this bag should last for up to 100 days before needing replacement (a spare bag is supplied).

The X50 uses Lidar (which stands for light detection and ranging) navigation for mapping your home. It also has a camera to help the machine identify and, hopefully, avoid obstacles such as cables, toys and pets. The camera can also be used as a remote viewer. You can even drive the bot around your house remotely and scare off burglars (or the neighbour’s cat) by shouting at them through the tinny speaker.

The Lidar unit sits in a circular housing that can retract like a periscope to sit flush with the body. This reduces the robot’s overall height to 89mm so it can clean under low furniture.

Going under the sofa

Design

The X50 Ultra robot’s design resembles its competitors’ offerings. The only standout is the periscope-like Lidar unit, which is highlighted by a nice glowing blue ring.

But the robot has a quality feel to it despite its understated looks. The dock is huge at 570mm tall. But that height is understandable considering all that it houses.

You need to be a fan of gold and bronze, or you’ll want to hide the dock away behind a chair.

Set-up

Set-up was a breeze.

There is a clear, simple start-up guide, and once you scan the QR code under the bot’s magnetic top cover, the app will guide you through all the set-up steps.

After that’s done, you get a quick run-through of the main features and buttons in the app. It’s nicely done.

My children decided that the new addition to the family would be named Dave.

App and map

The next set-up step is to map your home. With the Dreame X50 Ultra, this is a very speedy process. It only took 7 minutes for Dave to map our entire top floor at home. This consists of 4 rooms and a hallway and is around 55m².

You then need to spend a little time editing the map into rooms and renaming them. The app will try and do this automatically, but you’ll need to use the merging and dividing tools to tweak the details.

You can also:

• define areas into different floor materials and carpet pile types
• add no-go zones or virtual walls
• label where furniture and curtains are situated
• specify low-lying areas (where the Lidar periscope will need to retract to allow the bot to clean under)
• define a cleaning order for rooms, for when you decide to clean the whole house in one go.

Other floors or separate areas can be mapped by enabling multi-floor map management. Then you just take the robot to the new area to repeat the mapping process.

The app presents 3 main cleaning options: ‘room’, ‘zone’ or ‘all’. You can also customise the cleaning modes of these options to just vacuuming or mopping, vacuuming and mopping together or mopping after vacuuming.

You can adjust the suction power from ‘Quiet’ to ‘Max’. Even mop ‘wetness’ has 32(!) levels to choose from. We’ve no idea why you’d need so many levels of water flow. Surely 10 or even 5 levels would be enough!

You can also customise the cleaning on a room basis. For example, you could have maxed-out cleaning settings for high-traffic rooms, such as hallways and kitchens, and specify lower settings for less dirty areas.

The app seems to have every option you could need. One of my favourite features is the ‘short-cuts’ that are presented to you on the home screen. Basically, you can predefine a cleaning routine as a short-cut. One tap on the routine’s short-cut will start the routine. This could be as simple as just cleaning the lounge or more complex routines, such as cleaning specific zone areas, like around the dining table, kitchen workbench or pet food bowl. For us, it’s very convenient as we often just focus on cleaning specific areas or rooms at one time.

I did notice, however, that some of the translations in the app are a bit ‘odd’, which indicates to me that it was probably rushed out without proper checking. Take a look at the image below for a good example!

Voice control

The X50 Ultra has built-in voice control. This is a great feature, albeit with some limitations – you need to use the prescribed commands listed in the app, or the bot won’t understand you.

These are commands such as “OK, Dreame. Start cleaning” or “OK, Dreame. Clean the bathroom”.

The limitation with voice control is that the bot won’t recognise any custom names for rooms and won’t activate the short-cuts that I’ve found so useful.

But, if you only ever want to clean a specific room or the whole house, it’s great to not have to wrestle your phone out of your pocket and launch the app each time.

Cleaning

If you’ve checked any of our robot vacuum cleaner reviews, then you won’t be surprised to hear that robot vacuums aren’t the greatest carpet cleaners. This is mainly because they can’t suction onto the carpet with enough force to suck up every small particle and propel themselves forward at the same time.

They’ll pick up larger particles easily. But they aren’t great at the deeper cleans carpets need to remove all the fine dust that can affect people with allergies – you’ll need a standard or stick vacuum cleaner for that.

So don’t believe all the hype about increased suction power on newer models – we’ve yet to put the X50 Ultra through the full lab test, but in the home test, Dave performed about as well as any of the other flagship models we’ve trialled (that is, he’s average at cleaning carpets).

On hard floors, it’s a different story. The Dreame X50 Ultra did a super job on our wooden floors.

The side ‘swisher’ brush that extends to get right into edges and corners, combined with a mop pad that does the same, gives way more cleaning coverage.

The ability to control the wetness of the mop pads means you can mop dirtier areas more effectively. Of course, the robot vacuum cleaner will still miss the odd spot of dirt, and a round mop pad can’t get fully into a square corner, so you’ll still need to ‘touch up’ some areas yourself on a regular basis.

X50 Ultra's mop pad extended

For deep-pile carpets, the vacuum-only function offers a neat feature, where the magnetic mop pads are detached automatically and left in the dock. This means you’ll not have wet mop pads touching the carpet.

When doing a lot of mopping, the bot interrupts the clean to automatically return regularly to the dock to wash its mop pads. This uses more battery power and water.

Luckily, the app allows you to change the frequency of mop washing – you can set it to wait until it has finished cleaning the room or area before it returns to the dock. Alternatively, you can increase the mop washing frequency by anywhere from 10 to 50 minutes. Bear in mind that increasing this time will lead to dirtier mop heads cleaning your floors.

Navigation seemed pretty reliable when cleaning, but I noticed that sometimes Dave got a little confused and would take some illogical cleaning routes. This was especially noticeable around and under furniture. It meant that cleaning took longer than expected and used more battery power.

The bot eventually cleaned the whole area, but I can’t help feeling Dreame’s navigation algorithm has a few teething issues that need attention. One time, Dave simply refused to cross from the hallway into the kitchen and returned to the dock instead!

Hopefully, these problems will be ironed out in future software updates.

Cleaning routes - a mix of logical and illogical paths!

Should you buy the Dreame X50 Ultra robot vacuum cleaner?

The robot vacuum market is developing rapidly, and newer, better flagship models are getting released regularly. As such, it’s hard to recommend spending a vast amount of money on a model that will likely get superseded in 6 months’ time.

The Dreame X50 Ultra has pretty much every feature available currently, and a pretty good app to boot. But the odd navigation issues were a little surprising for a top-of-the-line model, so I’d suggest considering other manufacturers’ offerings before you dig deep into your pockets.