EDIT: I'm returning to this review to add more information after over 20 months of ownership. Since writing this review, the listing for this robot has now changed. The model I own - and the model this listing USED to be for - was a ECOVACS Robotics DEEBOT N79S, NOT a U2 model. I therefore cannot comment on if this review is still relevant to the listing it is currently displayed under, and the following review is of course for the N79S model, which appears to be discontinued. However you may still experience many of the same points of this review for this model as well. Unfortunately due to lack of app updates critical features of the vacuum will be unavailable to many on modern devices. I have updated my review and score to reflect this. More details and information - including a fix - detailed below. There are however many upsides to the robot still, and ownership is still worthwhile depending on how techy and thrifty you are. ------------Original Review--------------- We have three cats, so we're always looking for something that can give us an edge in the fight against fur, particularly downstairs, where the cats spend most of their time. This little robot is just the best at what it does! When I first got it I ran it right away with the small amount of charge it comes with, and while it only ran for about 30 minutes on "standard" suction, it managed to fill up most of it's container with hair! (pictured). I dislike anything that has functionality locked behind an app, unfortunately you have to use the app to set up scheduled cleaning and choose the suction strength. However setting up both the robot and the app was painless for me and worked with no issues right out of the box. (Edit: The Robot will not work with 5ghz wifi and the app has many issues including some specific to newer devices. This will severely impact the functionality of the robot for many people. More in my updated section below) We have ours set up to clean twice a day, once at 11am and once at 10pm. It's quiet enough - even on max suction - that you could leave it running downstairs while sleeping upstairs. And each clean runs for about 60-90 minutes on max suction until the battery runs out, which is enough for it to run through our small kitchen, hallway and living room about 4 or 5 times before returning to charge. The remote comes with controls so you can direct it to a specific area if you need to, and the additional modes are pretty great (though scheduled cleaning only ever works with "auto" mode, but in practice this isn't an issue). I'm impressed with how it manages to find it's way back to charge every time. I have to rarely to rescue it for no reason (normally I've left something in the way), and it does a great job of cleaning around the wires instead of sucking them up. We have the charging station placed underneath the TV stand, it has no problem locating it and hiding underneath the TV stand to charge out of view. For pet-less apartments, I can see one of these easily replacing a proper vacuum altogether. For us that won't be the case as we still need to vacuum upstairs manually and get fur out from the places the robot can't reach. But it has reduced the amount of times I need to vacuum from 4 times a week to just once in a while. Plus the amount of fur in the house has reduced overall since the robot catches it before us humans get a chance to kick it around the house. Overall for the price this is a must buy. A few more features (like choosing suction strength based on time of day) would be nice, but the features it does have all work great and are implemented well. It's simple, it gets the job done. ------------Update ------------ Quite a few things have changed around here since we first got this robot so it's time for an update. Lets start with the bad. The robot does not work on 5ghz wifi. When this robot launched this wasnt that big of a deal, but this will be an issue for most modern households as pretty much all ISPs offering fibre are rolling out 5ghz routers now and have been for some time. Assuming however you're techy enough to configure your router on 2.4ghz, the app itself also has issues running on modern devices that support 5ghz wifi. Put simply it just will not connect, and you will need to use an older android or iphone which does not have 5ghz wifi at all, in order to correctly set up the robot as intended. To be clear, this is a software issue with the app simply not being coded to operate properly on newer devices with 5ghz wifi. Support for the N79s model has clearly discontinued and they have no interest in updating the app to work properly. This can be a huge problem as essential functionality like cleaning schedules and most importantly vacuum STRENGTH is locked behind the app, which now cannot be easily set up or used on 5ghz. This means that if you cannot get the app to work, your vacuum is only operating at 50% it's intended power (as you cannot enable max power unless via the app) and has to be manually activated every time you want it to clean. There was no reason to lock this functionality behind an app, when the device comes with a remote for other functionality. Had the remote offered the features too, they wouldn't be locked behind the fragility of the app and reliant on app updates - and because they are - most of this vacuums feature set is now rendered obsolete for the vast majority of people. For this reason I have deducted 2 stars from my original review as it is an incredibly dumb, short sighted, and greedy move on ECOVACS part. If you're techy with this stuff and have an old phone or tablet without 5ghz wifi laying around, it's possible for you to temporarily disable the 5ghz band on your router, and use the older device for set up, so that you can connect the robot to 2.4ghz wifi in order to set up the app initially. When using this method, if the app still will not connect and you see the message "switching to manual mode" quickly connect to the ECOVACS_#### wifi, and leave it for a while, assuming all the devices are friendly with each other, it should work. From here you can "set and forget" your cleaning schedule and vacuum strength, and then re-enable 5ghz wifi and chuck your old phone back in the drawer-of-forgotten-things However, on to the good parts. I can happily say that if you're willing to get hands-on with some repairs and maintenance, this robot will last you for a long time and after a recent service it's still ticking along just as good as it did when we got it. The repairability of this device is excellent, with parts easily available, apparently modular, and inexpensive. Pay attention to the number of beeps the robot gives when it encounters an issue, and whether or not the red light is solid or blinking. This will help you troubleshoot issues and replace parts which may be wearing out or broken. After a while we noticed the robot was not doing as good of a job as it used to in cleaning, missing obvious dirt and not going around anywhere near as much as it used to. We also noticed that it would just randomly stop, sometimes it would beep an error code but there would be no noticeable issues with any of the brushes or wheels, and occasionally the whole robot would just die when bumping into something requiring a flick of the switch off and and on to come back to life. I was able to completely dismantle the robot with just a normal screwdriver and a youtube video. Everything is connected to the main board via plugs and wires so no soldering required and parts can be easily swapped out with new ones. I cleaned out the debris and hair wrapped around the various motors inside the robot, flushed it of dust, and replaced the battery, and gave the motors a touch of WD-40. The robot then operated just as good as the day we bought it. In all I'm still happy with the robot if not a little frustrated with the poor quality of the app.