Neabot NoMo N2 robot vacuum: Solid two-in-one robot workhorse for daily cleaning | ZDNet

I had high hopes of the Neabot NoMo N2 after reviewing Neabot’s first foray into robot vacuums in June 2020. I was also blown away by the performance and style of the NoMo Q11 when I reviewed it in June 2021.

My first impression upon opening the box was that it looks like the Neabot NoMo 2 has gone back to its design roots and has not built on the futuristic design of its predecessor.

On getting the robot out of the box, I found a fairly ordinary auto-empty station and the robot vacuum itself. The auto-empty station looks very similar to the Ultenic T10 that I looked at in July 2021 with a digital display on the station. 

The Neabot NoMo N2 is a nice-looking robot with a LiDAR bump on the top of the unit and obstacle avoidance which works well. It works with Google Assistant and Alexa.

The unit has a sweeping brush on one side and a roller brush underneath the unit. It comes with a mop pad that can be fitted to the robot’s 250ml water tank so it will sweep and mop at the same time. Make sure to clean the mopping cloth each time you use the robot so that you do not mop the floor with a dirty cloth.

The NoMo N2 is fairly powerful with a maximum suction power of 2700Pa. Even at maximum power, the robot is quiet. It will auto boost when it encounters carpets and will cross most thresholds between rooms.

Its 5200mAh battery will last for up to 150 minutes on quiet mode. When I ran it on max mode to clean my carpeted areas, I probably got about 45-50 minutes of vacuuming before the unit needed to go back to the charging dock.

The NoMo N2 has a 300ml on-board dust box and a 2.8l bag in its auto-empty station which did not need to be emptied at all during the three weeks the robot was in use.

Now the tricky part — I had huge issues connecting the robot to the app. I have reviewed around 45 of these robot vacuums, and most have apps, so I have a good idea of how they connect to my 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network.

This vacuum does not use the excellent Neabot home app that I used to connect to the Q11. It instead uses the Neabot app, which bundles all of the robots together. 

I had challenges from the start. The app needed an email address to register, so even though I had an account on Neabot home, I had to register again.

The app sends a confirmation code to the specified email address, but after waiting for an hour for the confirmation code to my .co.uk email address, I gave up and used a generic gmail.com address to get the code needed to log on successfully.

When I selected the NoMo N2 robot, the app asked that I turned on location services — even though I had enabled all location services on my mobile device.

I still could not connect to the app. I contacted Neabot who sent me an updated .apk file to download, which did quickly connect to the app, followed by a notification about the updated app in the app store a couple of days later.

I suspect that this would not have happened so quickly had I not been reviewing the robot. A buyer who purchased the device and contacted support with the same issue might have had a longer wait for a resolution.

I was annoyed about the requirement for location services. I shouldn’t have to share my geographical location in order to pair my robot to Wi-Fi.

This is extremely intrusive and unnecessary. It begs the question of why location accuracy is necessary to use an app. 

Surely the country of use would be sufficient, and as I like to turn my location services off unless specifically using an app that needs it, I resent having to turn it on just to clean the house.

In use, the app is reasonably good — although the image of my floor space was skewed from upright and I could not change this. This meant that setting no-go areas was rather difficult.

The robot also did not recognise the different rooms in the house — even though there is a threshold between each room and one of the rooms in the ‘Room 1 area’ is fully carpeted. Another robot I am currently trying recognised all rooms on its first pass.

The robot thoroughly sweeps the area and can always find its way back to the charging station. I can empty it quickly and efficiently. Mopping is reasonable, although I prefer to wet the mopping pad before I start the robot on a mopping cycle.

All in all, for under $400 the Neabot NoMo N2 is a nice mid-priced two-in-one sweeping and mopping robot with a reasonable app and easy management features.

Until the end of December 2021, there is an extra 10% off coupon if you use the code NEABOTN2 on the Amazon site, and there is a sale too at Neabot’s official link.

However for me, the need for my geographical location with all location services enabled just to connect the robot to the app has been a huge turnoff, and I will be pleased to put this location-hungry robot back into its box.