iLife A10 robot vacuum review

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It’s been a robot vacuum whirlwind here in the TechGadgetsCanada test kitchen. The newest to cross the floor is the mid-priced iLife A10 robot vacuum. I had a chance to test one out in my home for a few weeks and I’ll tell you all about what it can do, how it works and whether I’d recommend it for your home.
What’s in the box
The iLife A10 is a vacuum robot; in the box you get the robot, charging dock and cord, a cleaning tool, and some extra parts including an extra roller brush, filter and corner brushes. This botvac also has a remote control.
Key features
The main feature of this vacuum is laser mapping. This vacuum uses laser technology which essentially lets the bot see its surroundings with LiDar which stands for Light Detection and Ranging. Lidar uses light in the form of a pulsed laser to measure distances. Simply put, these technologies let the bot see obstacles, walls, furniture and more and orient itself properly within the map in real-time.
With the laser mapping, the robot will be able to construct a map of your home inside the iLife app. With the map drawn, you should be able to get customized and room-by-room cleaning.
While getting the bot set up was pretty much plug and play, when it came to the mapping I did have some difficulty.
Getting iLife A10 to map my home
The iLife A10 went out a few times to do its initial mapping run, but in several instances it just died in a random location, so it seemed this rendered it unable to complete the map. It wasn’t stuck on something or out of juice, it just shut down and gave up, so I wasn’t initially able to get a functioning map. I decided to reset the bot and try again.
On the next go, I was able to see an accurate map, but then my next struggle was with how to label and delineate the rooms.
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The map editing tool lives in a pull up app drawer, but using it is an exercise in frustration. There’s no instructions in the manual for how to use it and the app certainly does not help. I tried dividing up spaces, merging spaces and even naming spaces, but I wasn’t able to do it. I just got odd error messages like “the door is not in the room” or “the room size is too small after division”.
After being absolutely frustrated with this interface I had to ask iLife for help but I wasn’t able to make sense of the directions.
In the end, with quite a bit of try, try, try and try again, I was able to get most of the areas I wanted to seperate, delineated. That meant I was not able to use room by room cleaning.
Using room-specific cleaning
Once your botvac has mapped your space, you can go into the app and ask it to clean only specific spaces. You can trigger it with a tap or set it on a schedule. While building and managing the map was a terrible user experience, the bot did a good job at doing this room-specific cleaning.
The physical remote supposedly lets you do many of the things you can on the app, including starting and stopping the bot, sending it home, doing a spot clean, increasing suction and even scheduling-and many of those options are activated with just a single push of a shortcut button.
Except I couldn’t get the remote to work at all. While I was able to set the time, not one the buttons worked. The manual was no help here. I couldn’t see if it needed pairing, resetting or what. So I gave up and simply used the app.
Awfully designed dustbin
Let’s talk about the dustbin on the iLife A10. It’s awful. The release button on the bot doesn’t properly open the bin so you can empty it. While most other bots have a latch that lifts, and the door opens with it, this one you have to press in as if you’re closing the bin lid, then try to separate the lid from the bin.
Overall review: iLife A10 robot vacuum
Overall this vacuum has some good points and some disappointments. ON the good side, it’s customizable, with a suction level you can control so you can manage noise level. With that said, on some of the lower levels it’s not working as thoroughly, so you may need to schedule it to go out more often on lower power.
I thought it did a great job doing room specific cleaning, and it didn’t get stuck often at all.
While the home mapping worked well, and the controls in the app are okay, the app provided a terrible user experience for dividing up rooms -it was buggy and only seemed to work one out of 10 times.
Also the downside, the dustbin door is ridiculously backwards and hard to open without spilling and the remote control never worked for me. And the random shutdowns and stalls were weird.
Overall this is not my favourite of the robot vacuums, but I do think with some software updates and a new dustbin mechanism it could be improved. It sells for about $349USD and you can get it from Amazon.