Segway Navimow X350E review: A big, expensive robot mower for large lawns

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We’ve reviewed some large robot lawn mowers before but the Segway Navimow X350E is an absolute monster. However, its size is justified by the amount of grass it can cut, with Segway declaring it can easily cope with lawns up to 5,000m², even on slopes of up to 50%. It doesn’t just do that by virtue of its sheer bulk. It also covers ground fast, has a powerful battery, and doesn’t require you to lay metres of boundary wire before you can get started.

The downside is the £3,199 price, which looks eye-wateringly expensive next to the cheapest robot mowers around. However, if your lawn is larger than an acre, you’re going to need a mower that can cope with the space.

Segway Navimow X350E review: What do you get for the money?

As befits a large mower, the Segway Navimow X350E comes in an enormous box that’s genuinely problematic to lift – I’d recommend having a companion present to help get it into your garden. The mower itself measures 670 x 530 x 290mm (WDH) and weighs a hefty 19.8kg.

The cutting disc, which spins three short, razor-like steel blades around its outer edge to cut the grass, is 21cm in diameter. That’s larger than most, meaning fewer passes and less wear on your lawn, but it looks comparatively small compared to the rest of the mower when you flip it over and look underneath.

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It’s slightly offset to the mower’s right-hand side, but still sits 11cm away from the outside of the mower, so it won’t get right up to the edge of your lawn unless your borders are at the same height as the lawn – a sunken path, for instance.

As befits a mower of this size, the Navimow also comes with a sizeable base plate that it sits on and charges from when not in use. That measures 650 x 845 x 260mm (WDH) and needs to be positioned perpendicular to your lawn perimeter, so the mower can roll off the plate without risk of crossing a boundary. It comes with a 10m power cable to connect it to a standard UK plug socket.

The other thing you’ll find in the box is a GPS unit – a small black box that sits on a pole you can sink into your garden. The mower uses this, and a series of cameras and sensors mounted at the front, to navigate itself around the nooks and crannies of your garden and avoid obstacles that get in its way.

Segway Navimow X350E review: Is it difficult to set up?

As long as your garden has a clear line of sight to enough GPS satellites, setting up the Segway Navimow X350E is straightforward. I have a relatively open garden, so encountered no problems: I positioned the base plate near my power socket, located the GPS unit nearby, and connected them all together with the supplied cables.

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The mower arrived with enough charge to get going immediately and the rest of the setup is carried out using a smartphone app. This checks everything is in place and connected correctly, then directs you to drive the machine, by touchscreen, around the area of grass you want it to mow.

This is significantly easier than laying a boundary wire as required by most cheaper mowers. If you make a mistake, you can rewind the mower and try again, and there’s also an automatic mode that will use the mower’s cameras to spot the boundary and do it for you. Again, if it goes wrong, you can rewind and drive it around yourself. In this way, even large gardens can be mapped relatively rapidly, and as soon as it’s done you’re good to mow.

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Segway Navimow X350E review: How well does it mow the lawn?

When it comes to mowing, the Segway Navimow X350E did a good job overall, covering the majority of my lawn covered quickly and competently.

The one area it didn’t finish well was around the edges. The gap between the cutting blade and the outer wheels left a gap that I needed to follow up with a manual mow, even though my lawn is surrounded by a row of bricks that have been sunk to lawn level. 

Thanks to its front-facing cameras, the mower also has a certain amount of obstacle avoidance and it would be nice to think that you might not have to pick up every last dog ball and children’s toy before sending the mower out.

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In practice the results were patchy. To test it I left out a dog’s ball, a partially chewed stick and I observed the robot’s behaviour around my whirlygig washing line. The latter usually takes quite the battering from blind robots with no collision detection.

The robot behaved impeccably around the ball. It stopped before it, turned round and then continued mowing. This happened a couple of times before the mower was clear of the ball and as soon as it reached the other side of the lawn it went back and mowed the gap left in the ball’s shadow.

It coped with the washing line nearly as well, except the mower didn’t go back and fill the gap behind it, even though it visibly remained unmowed on the progress map on the Navimow app. With the chewed stick, however, the mower spotted it on the first pass and missed it on the way back, making something of a racket as blades and stick collided.

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Otherwise, the mower’s coverage was both efficient and thorough. The robot goes around the edges first, or as close as it’s able to, then covers the rest of the lawn in regular stripes. It tackles these from different directions on different days, so lawns with undulations should still get a decent cut over time, as any tricky patches are approached from a different angle.

What I couldn’t fully test was the battery life, because my lawn is a relatively small 100m². To cover this area, the battery used just under 10% of its charge, so you could reasonably expect a good 800m² from a full battery before it considers heading home for a top-up. That 100m² mow took around 25 minutes, so it holds up to Segway’s claim that the battery can run for around 180 minutes before requiring a recharge, which takes 80 minutes.

Using these figures, I’d estimate a 5,000m² lawn would take more than six complete mow and charge cycles to cover its maximum area, and that this would take 27 hours to complete. However, using the app you could split the lawn into sections and schedule different areas to be cut on different days, if you wanted.

Segway Navimow X350E review: Should you buy it?

The main draw of the Segway Navimow X350E is its ability to cover large areas and if that is what you need, it is a highly capable option at a reasonable price, albeit one that will require you to mow around the edges from time to time.

Those with slightly smaller areas to mow could certainly pay less to get a similar cut, with the Segway Navimow i105e (£949) immediately springing to mind. It uses a similar setup to the X350E but is only rated to cut lawns up to 500m² in size. It also uses satellite navigation but doesn’t have the obstacle detection of the X350E.

But the best premium robot mower I’ve tested is the Husqvarna Automower 305E NERA. This also uses GPS to find its way around your lawn, and has a secondary blade at the back of the mower, which swings around and mows the edges better than any other robot mower on the market. It doesn’t cover as much ground as the Navimow X350E (only 900m²), but the more expensive 320 NERA, is rated at up to 3,300m², and might well be what you’re looking for.

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Written By

Andy Shaw

Andy Shaw has been a professional reviewer for 30 years, starting his career critiquing PC games and rapidly expanding his horizons into all types of computer hardware and software. Since then he’s worked for a broad selection of print magazines and websites, as a writer and editor, both on staff and as a freelancer. Nowadays he applies his well-honed critical eye to reviewing a wide range of products, from vacuum cleaners to printers.

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