Samsung Jet Bot Combo AI review: A solid clean with buggy software

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If you look through any tech site’s list of the best robot vacuum cleaners, one thing tends to stand out: The brands included are all mostly dedicated robot vacuum brands.

You have Ecovacs, Dreame, iRobot, and Roborock popping up everywhere, with maybe the odd Dyson thrown in. You would almost suspect that they were the only brands releasing robot vacuums.

But more and more big brands are playing in the space. Philips just announced its first robot vacuums, and Samsung has had several models, including its most recent, the Jet Bot Combo AI.

Samsung has been on a massive quest to shoehorn AI into every product category this year, from smartphones to ovens. So it’s no surprise that its robot vacuum model boasts AI features.

Unfortunately though, this model is still a long, long way from being intelligent. While it is a decent cleaner capable of maintaining your home’s cleanliness, it also has some extremely frustrating drawbacks.

What is the Jet Bot Combo AI offering?

The Samsung JetBot AI is a premium all-in-one robot vacuum, complete with a sophisticated auto-empty station and circular mopping pads.

Style-wise, it’s actually one of the first base stations to offer a different design to the likes of Dreame and Ecovacs. The water tanks are built into the unit itself, rather than just being hidden away under a cover flap, and I truly appreciate the sleek design.

The vacuum itself looks much like every other robot vacuum on the market. It’s a circular shape with a protruding head that houses a lot of its navigational and mapping sensors. There’s a single right brush designed to push dirt and debris into the vacuum’s gaping maw, and the two mop pads at the back of the vacuum are the circular kind that spin to scrub your floor.

A lot of the key selling points on this model are tied to those mop pads. Samsung’s base station will wash the mop pads at high temperature, and sanitise the mop pads with steam, to remove bacteria and ensure your mop pads are actually cleaning your floor, not just smearing filth.

The base station also dries the mop pads after use with hot air, so you can leave the Jet Bot Combo AI to clean for longer.

I also really appreciate the fact that the robot will just leave the mop pads in the base station when it’s out vacuuming, but not mopping. I saw that in the Dreame L20 Ultra when I reviewed it, and would like it to become much more commonplace.

The vacuum features a high-efficiency brush with a hair grinder, which promises to better deal with human and pet hair. The vacuum only offers 6,000 Pa of suction, which is about half what some other high-end models offer, though that’s not to say it doesn’t vacuum well.

When it comes to AI, Samsung uses it for obstacle detection and mapping. It can recognise a number of different object types, and will then avoid those objects as it cleans.

For its mapping and control, Samsung uses SmartThings, rather than a dedicated app, which is the same app it offers to control other appliances, like the AX46 air purifier and the Music Frame.

There are pros and cons to this approach, but overall, it’s a simple interface to control the vacuum. You also get Bixby control if you like talking to your appliances.

What does the Jet Bot Combo AI do well?

When it works as it’s supposed to, the Jet Bot AI cleans well. On a simple vacuum setting, it’s actually pretty quick to clean the house, noticeably faster than the other vacuums I’ve reviewed this year.

I’m a big fan of the fact the Jet Bot leaves the mop pads on a straightforward vacuum run. It’s robust hot water and steam cleaning of the mop pads means that even after a few weeks of using the vacuum every other day, there hasn’t been any unpleasant smells coming from the vacuum’s direction.

The obstacle avoidance here is as good as I’ve experienced as well. This isn’t to be confused by the object recognition, which hilariously told me there was a cup/plate under my bed, when it was, in fact, the leg of my bedside table.

But the Jet Bot never got stuck on a cable or a sock, which is impressive.

The vacuum’s brush design is also a good development over all the other robot vacuums I’ve tested. Rather than just being a single long brush, the roller is effectively split into two sections, so hair can tangle in the middle between the brush parts.

This means that it won’t tear the rubber brush (like the Dreame models I tested), and because it doesn’t tangle the actual brush, it is easier to clean up.

I can’t really tell whether the Hair Grinder function improves how it captures hair. After two weeks, there’s still a heap of hair wrapped around the brush, but it’s definitely easier to clean off than other brands of robot vacuums.

What could the Jet Bot Combo AI improve?

So far, the Samsung Jet Bot Combo AI seems like a really solid investment. But there have been a number of really wild situations that put reservations on me recommending this robot vacuum.

The first is basic: the Jet Bot has a tendency to simply not clean sections of my home. It’s quite random — working around my living room last week, for example, it hit a point behind my lounge, then decided it couldn’t find the room, and returned to the base, apparently done.

This morning, it identified the rug in my living room as an obstacle (correctly, it said it was a mat), but rather than step up and do the work, the Jet Bot just decided not to vacuum it.

(This was on a vacuum only setting. If it was a vacuum and mop setting, I’d almost forgive it because I’m not a fan of the mop pads rubbing against the carpet).

Of course, other times it did the opposite: Making its way into my son’s carpeted bedroom to mop, despite there not being any section of the floor that wasn’t carpet. It drove around for 10 minutes trying to work that out, for what it’s worth.

(It didn’t actually mop, though. The mop pads were lifted as it drove around. Which is even more bizarre if you ask me. Why would it do that?)

It’s maybe speculation on my part, but I’ve noticed these situations happening more recently as robot vacuums introduce more “AI” features.

Then there’s the software.

Deep within the settings of the SmartThings app, switched on by default for some reason, are two settings: “Repeat”, which will clean your home until the battery runs out, and “Continue cleaning after charging”, which sees the vacuum continue cleaning after it’s charged.

The result is a default setting that will see the vacuum clean until you tell it to stop.

Why would anybody want that at all, let alone switched on by default?

On the mapping front, SmartThings is also a bit disappointing. For a start, it wouldn’t let me separate my closet from my ensuite, claiming that my ensuite was too small to be a separate room.

Ignoring for a second that there’s a physical ledge up into the ensuite the vacuum should have recognised as a barrier to a different room, the fact I couldn’t separate it (you know, to avoid having the vacuum mop my bathroom floors before the rest of the house, for example), this is not something I’ve ever experienced before. There’s no reasonable explanation for it.

For some reason, the “Home” map you can set in SmartThings also doesn’t connect at all to the vacuum’s map, which seems like a simple thing.

Verdict

Samsung’s Jet Bot Combo AI is a solid robot vacuum, but given Samsung’s dominance in other appliance categories as well as mobile phones, I expected a lot more from it, particularly on the software front.

The vacuum has a tendency to simply not do its job, or do things it shouldn’t, like trying to mop in a room full of carpet.

By using SmartThings for control — an app originally designed for smart home automation – you end up with a shoe-horned control mechanism that just doesn’t deliver the experience you might expect from a dedicated app.

If I’m honest, all of my issues could be improved with a few software updates. I sincerely hope Samsung does that, too.

Because the Jet Bot Combo AI looks great and, when it works, does a good job at actually cleaning.

Buy the Samsung Jet Bot Combo AI online

Samsung Jet Bot Combo AI

RRP: $2,499

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