Review: Eufy X10 Pro Omni

My house is so clean that this morning my 6-year-old walked through the kitchen, knelt on the floor, and looked up at me sternly. “This spot,” he informed me, “is sticky.” He found the idea of a sticky spot (where he had thrown a banana mere minutes earlier) to be abhorrent. (In his defense, I find it abhorrent too.)

This year’s Eufy X10 Pro Omni is so much of an improvement over last year’s X9 Pro (6/10, WIRED Review) that I can hardly believe it. Most importantly, it now has a self-emptying bin, but there are other small redesigns that make it much easier to use—and make my floors nearly spotless.

The only bad thing about the X10 Pro Omni is the price. It is $800. This is how much multifunctional robot vacuum-mops cost nowadays. I’m sorry for you and for all of us that the market is this way, but most vacuums that work this well have historically cost around $1,200 to $1,400. Given that I spent the past two years recommending a $700 robot vacuum that couldn’t even mop, I think it might be worth it.

Photograph: Adrienne So

I See You

The first and most obvious change between generations is that the docking station now has a self-emptying bin. If you really want self-automated cleaning—not a robot to ping-pong under the kitchen table for 20 minutes after dinner—your robot needs to be able to empty the bin when it’s full. Otherwise it just drags dirt around your house. I set the X10 Pro to empty every 20 minutes, but you can change the frequency in the app. The emptying function was effective, and at 75 decibels it’s as loud as a dishwasher, but it lasts only for a few seconds.

Instead of disguising the dirty and clean water tanks inside a housing that is trying to look like a spaceship, the tanks just click on top of the base. The height of the base is actually an inch taller that last year's model, but it looks and feels smaller because the space is being used more efficiently.

Photograph: Adrienne So

Like last year’s model, it also meets the TÜV Rheinland privacy and security certification. This is important, because it navigates via AI.See—a “visual recognition technology.” Basically, it uses a camera to steer around your house. It’s not upward-facing, and Eufy assures its customers that the photos are not stored in a server and are deleted before the next cleaning cycle. However, Eufy also doesn’t offer additional security features like two-factor authentication. This is just something to keep in mind if you feel squicky about having a camera in your home.

AI.See is interesting. Its estimates of its own accuracy seem generous—I forgot to screenshot all the instances where it identified my daughter’s various hair things as poop and warned me to “clean this area immediately.” I did think it helped the robot navigate seamlessly around my house. The few times it got stuck, I found that the roller brush had become ensnared in my daughter’s or my long hair. It's understandably much harder to see hair than it is to identify and avoid shoelaces, which tend to trip up even the best robot vacuums.

My first floor has five rooms with a total of about 800 square feet of cleanable space, depending on how widely my children’s stuffed animals are scattered at any given moment. The mapping function works quite well; it stored multiple maps on multiple floors without a problem. The battery life is decent—it can finish a whole first-floor vacuum in about an hour and a half, using about 75 percent of its battery life. You can also raise or lower the cleaning intensity, from fast to deep, and the suction power has a range from Quiet to Max.

Photograph: Adrienne So

On Max, it has a suction power of about 8,000 pascals. I have a theory about suction power. As I learned from the founders of the robot vacuum Matic, the level of suction power may matter less than whether your roller brush is able to agitate the carpet thoroughly. In any case, I didn’t notice a huge difference in the cleanliness level on the frequently trod areas of my carpet when I upped the suction power from Standard to Max.

The Price Is Right

The mopping is particularly good. The X9 Pro was capable of cleaning up half a jar of spilled syrup, and the X10 Pro works just as well. As with last year’s model, it exerts about 2 pounds of downward pressure with two mops that rotate 180 times per minute. When my children inexplicably decided to throw bananas at the breakfast table and leave sticky banana mash on the floor, the X10 Pro cleaned it up in minutes.

Mopping is the most disgusting household chore and the one I would do the least frequently if I could. Mopping the hardwood and tiled areas of my first floor (about 230 square feet) takes about 30 minutes, including time spent washing the mops. An onboard water tank keeps the mops continuously wet for the entire cleaning time. The dirty water tank has to be emptied and rinsed out every three or four cleans. Emptying and rinsing the tank is, as always, a vile and terrible task, but at least it doesn’t happen that often.

I do have to acknowledge that the Eufy X10 Pro is still just a robot, and it does have its limitations. It has enough battery for a complete vacuum but not enough to vacuum and mop 800 square feet. Blocking out enough time for it to run the full cleaning routine, plus charging, is annoying. I have to plan my cleaning routines carefully, because the drying time for the mops is three hours, and the half-inch that the mop raises off the ground is not quite high enough to not get my medium-high carpet wet. Its edging capabilities are a bit lacking, mainly because the AI camera is so sensitive. For example, I spilled a full jar of Cajun seasoning on the floor (for testing purposes), and while it cleaned up about 80 percent of the mess, it left quite a bit for me to vacuum up with my Dyson.

Still, it works fairly well and with far fewer hiccups than many other robot vacuums I’ve tried. There were no difficulties connecting to the app, no getting stuck on stray shoelaces, no constant pinging for me to clean some random sensor.

The most shocking thing is the price. Then again, for years I have been recommending a $700 robot vacuum that doesn’t even have a mop as our best pick. The Eufy X10 Pro Omni costs $800. Most other robot vacuums in this category with a similar feature set cost around $1,400. It’s still quite a bit of money, but I welcome the price drop. Maybe having a banana-free floor will once again become accessible to all.