Perhaps it’s the ultra competitive nature of the Robot Vacuum market today that is driving a shift in features down from the premium products at a much faster rate than we’ve seen in years before. That’s my sense from a month with the Ecovacs T90 Pro Omni taking care of things at our home.

It’s just five months since the Ecovacs X11 Omnicyclone captured my attention with it’s outstanding roller-brush mopping and fast charging capabilities. That $2,999 product is already on sale for under $2,000, putting its features side by side with this new T90 Pro which goes on sale today at $2,299. In simple terms, the advantage of the X11 is the quickly removable cyclonic vacuum canister for emptying out the home base station, but in terms of general clean and features, i’ve gotta say – loving the T90 Pro Omni.

The auto-empty station seems a touch smaller, narrower likely, and I’ll need to start measuring the clean and dirty water tanks because I think there’s a slight compromise there too.

But, I love the look of this station. It’s got a stone like design/pattern all around which is a bit warmer than a bright white or even the darker grey and black options.

The T90 Robot itself is white, and will do a sensational job of mapping your home as it first sets out to become your loyal servant.

Ecovacs app is easy to use, allows for quite small incremental changes to the water flow and suction options on the robot for each clean which allows you to manage the sound, power and water usage.

Originally the Auto Empty stations were a selling point for not touching the robot for weeks on end, but the reality is in my home – which has about 50m2 of floorspace we want cleaned by the robot each day, it’s all hard floors and we’re filling that dirty water tank every 3-4 days. So I’ve dialled back a bit the water use to try and stretch that out to a week for simpler maintenance.

We had an interesting chat in our home when setting up Boris (you have to name your robot – of course!). My wife wondered why we needed to lift the chairs off the floor each time we set him out to clean.

In fact you certainly do not. I do that for the original mapping of the home, and I like to do it once every week or two for a thorough clean. But night after night, at 9pm when the schedule kicks in, Boris can go out and wonder around each of the chair legs.

All this does is add time.

The basic “clear” house clean is a 55 minute job. Night by night it ranges between 67 minutes and 75 minutes, depending how many chairs or obstacles are out there.

Totally fine!

Core to the feature advantages of the T90 – especially for hard-floor homes, is the huge increase in the size of the brush roller mop.

Something like 50% longer at 27cm wide, it’s covering more of the floor each pass.

Spinning at 200RPM it does a sensational job of the clean.

Before it even finishes our dining area Boris the T90 needs to head back to clean the brush, it does this in the auto empty station, emptying out the dust bin and cleaning the roller.

At the same time, it does have the X11’s Power Boost technology adding clear percentage points of battery level in just a few minutes. I observed about a 5% jump in battery life during one of it’s returns back home – just means it can do more each clean.

Sadly Boris failed where all others do – the garage.

We have a carpeted garage area use as a second play room if you like, and it’s never been a robot paradise because of the small step down into that space.

Boris tried hard. Even when I noted on the map it was a step, he failed.

Ecovacs say the T90 can climb single steps up to 2.4cm and consecutive steps up to 4cm. It uses soft rubber teeth to do this, but for my step which was just closer to 4cm, it was a fail.

Maybe next year!

Not a deal breaker by any measure.

I struggle to see many things more than what the Ecovacs Deebot T90 pro Omni offers that you would need.

For $2,299 it’s not cheap, but it’s probably setting a new line in the sand on price – why would you pay more than that for a robot vacuum when this one does all this?