Roidmi X300 review: Attractive on the outside, imperfect on the inside

The Roidmi X300 is Roidmi’s latest foray into cordless stick vacuuming and, if you’re into stylish, Scandinavian-inspired design you’ll love its sleek appearance. Its curved lines and satin finish show an attention to external design that’s rare in vacuum cleaners.

There are other areas, too, where Roidmi has followed a slightly different path to rival cordless stick manufacturers. For example, this is one of the few cordless stick vacuums I’ve reviewed that keeps you updated with information through a smartphone app, as well as on an on-device display.

All this comes at a price, however, and with a recommended retail price of £599 it’s clearly been lined up to take on the likes of the mighty Dyson V15 Detect. So how does it compare?

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Roidmi X300 review: What do you get for the money?

The Roidmi X300’s box comes with the basic key elements you’d expect to see from a premium cordless vacuum cleaner, although it isn’t quite as stuffed as I’d hoped at this price.

The stick vacuum consists of the main handheld vacuuming unit, an extension wand and a single floor head. This floor head is equipped with one roller that combines both a light velvety fluffy texture and short brushes, arranged in a chevron pattern, for a bit of carpet agitation. There’s a light on the front that illuminates automatically when it’s shoved into dark corners or under furniture and the vacuum can detect whether you’re on carpet or hard floor, adjusting the suction accordingly.

Constructed from plastic, the Roidmi X300 is relatively light at 2.7kg. Most of the weight is up in the main vacuum unit (1.5kg including the battery) with the floor head only weighing 0.8kg. When assembled and ready for action it measures 256 x 190 x 1,140mm (WDH).

The core trio of attachments I’d expect to see in a vacuum of this price are included in the box in the form of a crevice tool, an upholstery/mattress brush and a dusting brush with a wider nozzle. These all connect to the main vacuum unit to turn it into a handheld, or can connect to the extension wand for added reach.

Both the upholstery tool and the crevice tool draw power from the battery. The former has a motorised brush bar to tease out pet hair while the latter (like the main motorised head) has a forward-pointing LED light, so you can see into the crevices you’re cleaning.

The collection bin has a capacity of 0.65l, which is slightly below that of the Dyson V15 Detect’s 0.77l. However, unlike a Dyson, the Roidmi can be emptied without having to remove the extension wand from the device.

The final thing you’ll find in the box is the magnetic, wireless charging station. This compact plastic bay has an adhesive pad at the rear and is designed to be attached permanently to a wall and connected to mains power. If you get the height right, it will be in the correct position to lean the vacuum up against it with the magnet holding it in place and charging it wirelessly.

If you’d rather not stick something to your wall, you can leave the dock in the box and plug the charging cable straight into a port on the side of the battery. The battery is removable but you only get one in the box. The last piece of the puzzle is the Roidmi app which can be installed from either the Apple or Google app stores.

The app connects to the vacuum via Bluetooth and lets you know the battery status, whether the bin is full and how long you should go before cleaning the filter. Most of these things, however, you could also find out by simply looking at the OLED display on the device itself.

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Roidmi X300 review: What’s it like to use?

The first thing you’ll notice when turning on the Roidmi X300 is that you have to hold the power button down for a second or two before it switches on. To my mind, this is an annoyance because, when it doesn’t switch on immediately, I tend to assume I’m pushing the wrong button and move on to the other one. It’s a superfluous feature because it’s highly unlikely you’d switch on the device by accident and not notice.

There’s only one other button on the device and it controls the suction settings. The X300 always starts in its weakest Eco mode but one press moves it to Standard mode, with a subsequent press moving it to Boost. Press it once more and it cycles back to Eco again. You can see all this information on the device’s bright OLED screen, which uses at-a-glance colour coding and an icon to show which mode you’re in (green for Eco, blue for Standard and red for Boost).

As mentioned above, the floor head is very light, with most of the weight being up at the handle. This makes it easy to move and carry around, although in use I found the head tended to lift off the floor a little when pulled back, which isn’t ideal.

The collection bin is mounted on the side of the tube that connects to the extension wand. This means that you can easily remove the bin to empty it, or simply open the trap door with the bin still attached to the main unit. This is in sharp contrast to the Dyson V15 Detect, where you have to remove any attached tools before emptying and the collection bin remains attached to the vacuum unit at all times.

Inside the collection bin there’s a rubber skirt that stops dirt from getting back into the system once it’s made its way into the base of the bin. If this gets too full, fluff can become trapped above the skirt and you’ll need to use your fingers or a tool to pull it out when emptying, which I found happened more often than not.

Dyson uses a similar system, but also incorporates a mechanism for levering the outer casing down below the skirt, which helps clear anything that’s caught above. You still need to poke your fingers in every now and again but not as often as seems to be required with the Roidmi X300.

The marketing blurb on the Roidmi website suggests the chevron-angled brushes will help keep the roller clear of hair tangles, a claim I must admit I wasn’t convinced about. Most other anti-tangle devices use combs, built into the floor head, to catch hair before it tangles.

I tested it on the carpet around where my long-haired family members brush their hair and on examination immediately after cleaning, my concerns appeared justified: there was plenty of hair wrapped around the roller. However, when I returned to examine the roller after further use, the tangles had disappeared. There was no trace of hair when I dismantled the roller from the floor head, even around the spindles. Despite my trepidation, I can’t really fault it.

I was also impressed with the Roidmi X300’s battery life. In Eco mode, with the floor head engaged, the battery lasted a record-breaking 114mins 45secs during our testing. As you can see from the chart below, this knocks the competition out of the park.

It’s worth noting, however, that I usually found myself switching it to Standard mode to improve the suction, particularly on carpet. On this setting, the battery lasted 24mins 31secs. I’d prefer to see a standard setting to last beyond the 30mins mark but this isn’t bad.

Switching to the most powerful Boost mode setting, however, the vacuum lasted 13mins 18secs, which is longer than most rivals when on full pelt and provides plenty of time for clearing up a significant spillage.

Suction is also good. Roidmi claims the X300 produces 27kPa of suction but I measured even higher at a peak 29kPa in Boost mode. It’s more powerful than most of its rivals, but it won’t worry the Dyson V15 Detect, which we’ve seen reach 31kPa before it automatically cuts out.

When it comes to Eco mode, you can see why the battery lasts as long as it does. It produces only 5kPa in this mode, which is well below that of rival units. However, if you need to eke some life out of a depleted battery, a little suction is better than nothing.

That just leaves the app, which I found to be completely unnecessary. Unlike a robot vacuum cleaner, where the app is central to the operation of the vacuum, here it added very little. Most of the useful information gathered by the app is available on the device’s screen, and I found the Bluetooth connection regularly disconnected, requiring the vacuum cleaner to be running before it would report on information such as battery levels.

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Roidmi X300 review: How well does it clean?

With a floor head roller that’s part soft roller and part brush bar, I wasn’t expecting any cleaning trouble from the Roidmi X300. Surprisingly, however, it still stumbled at one of our tests

We put vacuum cleaners through their paces by dropping measured quantities of Cheerios and flour onto both carpet and hard floor. By weighing how much a cleaner picks up from a single pass, we can compare its performance with every other vacuum we’ve tested.

Soft rollers usually make short work of Cheerios on hard floor where brushes alone can fail, because the Cheerios get trapped by the soft material and dragged under the roller into the path of the suction. In this test, the Roidmi X300 had no problem, gathering nearly all the Cheerios and only sending a few morsels scattering off in random directions. This happened even on the gentlest Eco setting.

Cheerios on carpet should be a simple job after that and, to a certain extent, the roller gobbled them up fine. However, during this test the tubes blocked up and it failed to gather more than around 30% of the spillage on its first pass.

Removing the collection bin and extension wand revealed two choke points. The worst offender is where the wand feeds the collection bin, which requires particles to pass through a narrow channel with a 90 degree change in direction. The strong suction ended up compressing the Cheerios into a blockage at this point.

Once this section was choked up, it also clogged at the ankle, leaving me with two blockages to clear out. So although the roller is capable, the internal tubing isn’t always up to the task. I reattempted the test after a clear out and it happened again. It would appear that, as the vacuum gets used and dirtier, it’s increasingly prone to clogging up.

When it came to our small particle tests, however (a flour spillage), the vacuum performed perfectly. It picked up everything on hard floor in a single pass. My kitchen scales registered the entire amount and there was no visible residue left on the floor. On short pile carpet, meanwhile, a single pass collected 94% of the initial flour spill, leaving a dusting behind. However, with a couple of subsequent passes it picked up the remainder.

Roidmi X300 review: Should I buy it?

If you prefer form over function, then the Roidmi X300 is definitely one of the better looking cordless sticks out there. It may be mostly plastic but its satin grey finish is classy, and its smooth curves make it comfortable to hold. It’s also proficient at cleaning up most dust and dirt. The one caveat is that it doesn’t fare so well with larger, stickier particles.

For the price, this makes the Dyson V15 Detect a better option. There are plenty of ease of use reasons why the Roidmi X300 is better, such as easier emptying and a longer battery life on its weakest setting. However, when it comes to the job of cleaning, the Dyson is a more reliable workhorse.

Elsewhere, better value can be had from Shark, with the Shark IZ300UKT costing significantly less but still offering excellent cleaning ability, even nudging ahead of the Dyson V15 Detect in this department.