Another flagship robot vacuum arrives, with all the latest robo-features and a price tag to match. But in its eagerness to pack the X40 Ultra with every cleaning convenience known to robo-kind, Dreame has been forced to sacrifice dust box capacity, and thus a true “hands off” experience.
The X40 Ultra is Dreame’s top-of-the-line robovac, retailing at a positively Roomba-like $2,799 (on sale at Dreame for $2,399 at the time of writing), although not quite as pricey as the $2,999 Roborock S8 MaxV Ultra. It improves over the X30 Ultra with 12,000Pa suction (vs 8,300Pa), 22mm obstacle clearance, a liftable and extendable side brush, and multi-spectrum direct detection. Disappointingly the dust box capacity is down from the X30 Ultra’s 350ml to just 300ml.
Apart from these tweaks, the X40 Ultra still packs four-level (as in, four levels of your house) lidar mapping, a fully “hands-free” base station that cleans, empties and refills the bot, and what Dreame calls “AI RGB + 3D Structured Light” obstacle avoidance: That means a camera combined with sensors to stop it bumping into your furniture.
Dreame X40 Ultra review
- First impressions
- Specs and price
- Design and ergonomics
- Setup
- Vacuuming vs mopping
- Cleaning performance
- Who is it for?
First impressions
Like all robot vacuums, the X40 Ultra is a device of two natures. One, the robot. The other, the vacuum. As a robot, the X40 Ultra is extremely impressive. It maps your home quickly and displays the map in the Dreame app.
It can also detect and recognise over 120 objects – the bot will even snap a pic of the obstacle and let you review it in the app. When doing so, it will label a little icon on the map, like “Fabrics 72%”, indicating that the thing it saw is 72% likely to be “fabrics” of some kind… which I guess is its polite way of saying “a dirty sock”. It often does this for objects it spots under the couch, making it a handy feature for finding that lost remote or, in our case, a dog toy.
Then there’s the vacuum side of the X40 Ultra. With 12,000Pa total suction, the vac can, at last, compete with a regular vacuum on power and extract most of the grunk (sic) up off any given surface. However, the tiny dust box capacity (just 300mL) is an issue for areas that haven’t been recently vacuumed. In a home like ours with two dogs, the dust box clogs almost immediately with dog hair and has to be manually emptied several times during a full house clean.
Dreame X40 Ultra specs and price
| Suction power | Up to 12,000Pa |
| Features | Vacuum Mop 300mL dust box Auto-empty station with 3.2L dust bag Automatic mop cleaning with hot air drying App control Auto carpet detection |
| Battery | 6,400mAh |
| Price (RRP) | $2,799 |
| Official website | Dreame Australia |
| Warranty | Three years |
Design and ergonomics
The X40 Ultra looks, at a glance, almost identical to most Dreame’s offerings. A circular bot with a protruding lidar unit on top. There’s a “bumper” sensor across the front of the bot but the combination of sensors, camera, and lidar means this is almost never deployed – it’s notable how infrequently the bot actually bumps against anything.
As a fully hands-off appliance, the concept of ergonomics here probably more readily applies to the bot itself. It has an extendable side brush that shoots out of the main robot casing from time to time and flicks away at corners or under low furniture, hopefully dislodging dirt and dust into the maw of the vac. It’s a bit haphazard, but the app lets you increase the frequency of how often the brush scoots out.
The bot has an impressive ability to negotiate uneven surfaces and little bumps and thresholds, such as where tiles turn to slate. The spec sheet says it can clear a 22mm rise, and in our house, it managed the doorway from the kitchen to the living room with only a couple of retries. Essentially, the bot attempts the traverse normally, and if it gets stuck, it backs up and raises itself a little, then charges the obstacle and bumps itself over.
Setup
Like other top-tier robovacs, the Dreame X40 Ultra is operated from an app, although you can just plug it all in, fill the water tank in the base station, and press the “clean” button on the robot.
The app unlocks much more control… so much control. So many options you have to swipe left and right on drop-down menus to see all the options. So many options it’s a good idea to go online and search Reddit or a similar forum for tips like “to get it to push right into some corners, turn OFF obstacle avoidance”. The “deep clean” option is also hidden until you choose Custom cleaning, then swipe up to see Route options, then swipe right on the row of route options to find Deep.
One config pitfall I fell into was not choosing the correct region during the setup of the app. Each Dream X40 Ultra is region-locked, and I left the app on the default UK setting. This locked out most of the features of the app until I realised the error and changed the app’s region to Australia. This option is under “Me” in the app, which isn’t exactly intuitive.
Oh, and you can connect the X40 Ultra to your Google Home or Alexa and operate it with voice commands too, if that’s your thing.
Vacuuming vs mopping
The X40 Ultra is a combo machine that includes a dust box and a water tank for mopping in the same fairly compact robot. As mentioned the dust box is only 300ml and the water tank a diminutive 80ml. The bot will return to the base station to refill the water tank, but I never saw it do the same for a full dust box.
There are options in the app to increase the frequency of dust box emptying, but often by the time the box was overfull, the “auto empty” function wasn’t powerful enough to suck the compacted dirt and pet hair out of the bot’s dust box!
The bot does drop its mops at the base station when it doesn’t need them which is a neat feature, and mopping works fairly seamlessly.
Vacuuming is a more hands-on experience for the user, especially if you have a larger carpeted home with pets. You will need to chase down the bot and hit the pause button on it, to inspect the dust box and empty it manually.
Cleaning performance
Overall cleaning performance is approaching what you can do yourself with a powerful cordless vacuum and a bunch of elbow grease. The small brush width and the tiny dust box mean you need to keep on top of how full the X40 Ultra is, or you may be disappointed with how it “misses” visible debris, especially on carpets. It’s not really missing it, there’s just no room in the dust box!
The mopping is best thought of as a refresher or touch-up level. You can increase the amount of water the mop uses, but it is just a quick swish across the floor, really. The X40 Ultra is very good at only mopping hard surfaces and avoiding rugs, thanks to its camera and down-facing sensors.
Who is the Dreame X40 Ultra for?
For robot fans, the Dreame X40 Ultra is an amazing machine. The accuracy of the mapping and the reliability of its object avoidance are both really impressive and show how far this technology has come. The X40 Ultra will even take a GIF of your pets’ reactions as they stumble across the bot doing its rounds.
As a vacuum, the X40 Ultra is powerful enough to tackle the filth level of most regular households, but the vac’s raw suck power is let down by that tiny dust box. This is where robot vacuums need a design revolution. Until then, the Dreame X40 Ultra is one of the most capable robovacs on the market today.
The post Dreame X40 Ultra review: Premium in performance and in price appeared first on GadgetGuy.
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