From X to Z – Narwal upgrades its top-of-the-line $2,499 Freo Z Ultra robot vacuum to add superior AI object avoidance and mapping thanks to a dual-camera system.
You might not be impressed by that, but the build quality and thoughtful base-station design of this whimsically-branded device should make it a contender for your choice of vac-mop-bot.
Table of contents
- What’s new?
- First impressions
- Design and ergonomics
- Setup
- Vacuuming vs mopping
- Cleaning performance
- Who is it for?
What’s new?
We may never know why Chinese robovac company Narwal chose that name, but it does confirm a trend in robovacs: The more esoteric the name, the higher-end the feel of the vacbot. Ecovacs is affordable and solid. Dreame adds a little bougie flair to its base station design (mm, faux gold highlights!) and Narwal gives you a device package that, jokes aside, offers a notable uptick in build quality and design.
The Freo Z Ultra comes in space grey or galaxy silver – known to us hardbitten gadget reviewers as “black or white”. My money is on the white unit. With its rounded edges and, dare I say, galaxy of glowing LEDs, it has an almost medical feel to it, which – after a week or so of using it as our main vac – kind of works.
Okay fine, when it comes to performance the Freo Z Ultra gets a boost to 12,000Pa of suckage, but perhaps even more significantly it is one of the quietest mop-vac-bots I’ve ever tested. From wheel-whir to vacuum roar, to whatever you call that noise these things make when they squirt water on your floor. The Freo Z Ultra is much quieter than the Dreame X40 Ultra I reviewed recently.
First impressions
Oh yes, about that blindfold. When you unbox your Freo Z Ultra after reading all about how marvellous the dual RGB camera system is going to be, the first thing you’ll notice is that Narwal has placed a large and prominent sticker to cover both cameras.
This sticker promises you that any images or video taken by the bot-mop-vac will absolutely NOT be uploaded to the cloud or used for market research or sold to scammers or anything like that.
One can’t help but think this might be in response to recent claims that some cloud-connected vac-bot-mops lack significant security, or indeed any security, against hackers. Narwal says the cameras are only used by the bot to navigate your house. It is still possible to view a live feed via the Narwal app, but crucially you have to stop the vac and perform a ritual of weird button presses to enable this for the first time. My advice? Probably don’t.
After removing the blindfold, further first impressions of this vac-mop-bot are wholly positive. The Freo Z Ultra is sturdy and built of high-grade plastics and metal. The mops have a unique almost triangular shape and are thick and rigid. The brush combines rubber sweeper blades with bristles for the best of both worlds.
Narwal Freo Z Ultra specs and price in Australia
| Suction power | Up to 12,000Pa |
| Features | Vacuum with approx 300mL dustbin Mop All-in-one base station Automatic mop cleaning with hot air drying App control Auto carpet detection Dual 136-degree cameras |
| Price (RRP) | $2,499 |
| Official website | Narwal Australia |
| Warranty | Two years |
Design and ergonomics
When you review a lot of robot vacuums you tend to get fixated on certain details that the casual shopper might not even think of as being a big deal. Anyway, dust box design! I’m on the record as bemoaning the very small dustboxes in these robots, which are often not sufficient for a properly dirty active Aussie home, especially if you have pets.
The Freo Z Ultra’s dust box is not any larger than its competitors (Narwal doesn’t disclose; I measured it at about 300ml) but it has a notably different design.
The removable collection bin actually has another plastic bin inside it, and Narwal includes a spare of this bin in the box (along with a spare filter and base station bust bag).
This inner bin is, according to Narwal, to keep dry waste and wet waste separate, but for us the interesting part is the way the vacuum directs air into it via a square aperture, rather than the more usual narrow rectangular hole.
In my testing and everyday use, this meant the Freo Z Ultra was able to take on and hold more debris and especially pet hair, than other bots I’ve tested.
Those other bots, when confronted with a rug full of a week’s worth of dog hair, would quickly choke. Hair would fill the dust box and then clog the intake. I never saw the intake get clogged when testing the Freo Z Ultra.
Alas, where Narwal giveth, Narwal also taketh away. Unlike other mop-vac-bots, the Freo Z Ultra’s inner bin doesn’t open on a hinge for easy manual disposal of a full load. You have to sort of bang it against the edge of the garbage bin. Maybe that’s why they give you a spare one.
Setup
What can I say? All these devices set up the same. First, you lay the bot on the floor and take off its top cover. You scan the QR code which directs your phone to download the app. You install the app and start it up, making sure to choose Australia as your region (many bots are region-locked). Then the app walks you through connecting the bot-vac-mop to your home Wi-Fi.
Eventually, you are told to shove the bot into the base station. This is when you’ll discover the Narwal Freo Z Ultra, unusually for high-end bots, fits entirely inside the base station. The footprint of the stored bot is much more compact than you’ll see on other bots.
My Freo Z Ultra came with a very low battery, and I recommend letting it charge to 100% before you start any work. This is because the bot will start working at 50% battery – and that means lots of returns to the base station to charge, during which you can’t do anything to the bot (such as empty its dust bin or wash its mops).
Mapping is competent but Dreame still seems to have the edge here, despite its flagship X40 Ultra only having one camera. The Freo Z Ultra also has a big LED on the front that it turns on in dark areas, but the maps it makes are basic, the app makes assumptions about the actual shape of the room, and there was some trouble identifying rug from slate.
Apart from those niggles, set up is a breeze and – assuming a full battery – you can get up and cleaning in no more than 10 minutes.
A quirk of configuration worth noting: The app allows you to turn off “stair detection” with the result that the bot will more easily negotiate humps and bumps (such as the threshold between a bathroom and a hall). But if you do turn off stair detection, the bot will happily throw itself downstairs while mapping a room. I learned that the hard way.
Vacuuming vs mopping
Unlike some other bot-mop-vacs at this price, the Freo Z Ultra doesn’t have the “kicky leg” feature I find so endearing on bots like the Dreame X40 Ultra. On that device, one side brush and one mop head can “kick out” to hit edges or flick debris into the vac.
That said, the Freo Z Ultra’s edge brushes are very good and the mops have a curious rounded triangle shape which makes them slightly larger than the mops on some competing vacs.
When you set the Narwal app to use the wettest possible mopping setting, the Freo Z Ultra does use quite a bit of water. Its detergent system is a cool base-station plug-in module that makes you feel like you’re reloading a sci-fi rifle, and it’s lemon-and-rosemary-scented. Narwal estimates yearly costs of detergent and base station dust bags and filters etc, at $25-$50.
Oh, and there’s one more feature. The Freo Z Ultra comes with a set of tiny dusters that Narwal calls “base board cleaning modules”. They clip to the side of the mop-vac-bot and it runs along close to your skirting boards and hopefully picks up the dust. Fun fact: this is also how rats navigate your house, except instead of tiny dusters they leave a trail of grease.
My verdict on the dusters? Not that effective, but worth it for making it look like your bot has sideburns.
Cleaning performance
Despite its dual cameras and superlative build quality, alas the Freo Z Ultra is not a next-generation mopper or vacuumer. It’s on par with other flagship bot-mop-vacs at this price, which means it’s great for daily touch-ups and not quite up to the job of a really massive deep clean.
When I boosted the settings to maximum suction and the wettest possible mopping, the Freo Z Ultra did a very good job on mildly soiled floors.
As mentioned it struggled to differentiate a Persian-style rug from similarly-coloured slate and there’s no way to edit the size of rugs and carpets in the app. Another oddity is that by default, when you map a new floor of your home, the Freo Z Ultra will set itself to “cross carpet” which means it won’t check to clean it. You need to edit the map, tap the carpet, and set it to “suction boost”.
However, since this is a software issue, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up being fixed in a future firmware patch. You can set the bot to update itself automatically, by the way.
Who is the Narwal Freo Z Ultra for?
The Dreame X40 Ultra has superior mapping and the kick-out brush and mop make a bit of a difference. But the Narwal Freo Z Ultra has partially solved the dust box problem with a superior engineering solution (at the expense of fiddlier manual emptying). Dreame still has the edge on mapping and app user-friendliness. But Narwal’s build quality really does elevate it over the competition.
If you want a device that looks clean, futuristic, and feels like the amount of money you spent on it, the Freo Z Ultra is hard to beat in this respect.
Further updates to the app should see the full potential of this dual-camera machine’s hardware unleashed. Even today though, this is a well-specced and well-designed device that can take on what the Aussie home dishes out.
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