To keep dog hair and toddler mess at bay, I use three separate vacuums: a heavy corded one for deep cleaning; a robot vac that I run daily for light maintenance cleaning; and a cordless handheld for quickly picking up small messes.
However, it is possible to go overboard. You don't want your descendants to find you buried, a skeletal arm sticking out from under piles of dusty, decaying vacuuming devices. That's where the Coral One comes in. The new vacuum ingeniously combines a portable handheld vac inside the automated robot vacuum. After you’ve done your daily maintenance clean, you can pop out the handheld unit, click on the dustbin and cleaning attachment, and clean out the cupholders in your car.
The Coral One combines an astonishing array of features in a good-looking package. It’s easy to use, and decently priced: It retails for $545, but right now, it’s marked down to $495. That's about half as much as a premium botvac from Neato[1] or iRobot[2].
But it's just too big. At five inches, it’s too tall to chase dust bunnies out from under my stove, or my children's cribs. And its utility is severely diminished without an app. It’s annoying to start a cycle, leave the house, and not realize until the next day that you can’t use the handheld because it got stuck behind a lamp and ran out of battery. Depending on your needs, I’d suggest economizing on the handheld and getting a Wi-Fi-enabled robot vacuum instead.
They Might Be Giants
The Coral One arrived in an astonishingly large box—35 inches wide, 35 inches long, and 10 inches tall—which contained the robot, a remote, a home...