Roborock Qrevo Master review: Half a step back

The premium you pay for an expensive robot vacuum cleaner should make it more independent and more reliable. While the Qrevo Master is wholly capable, its smarts don’t quite align with the asking price.

Retailing at $2,699 it is just $100 cheaper than Dreame’s X40 Ultra, and $300 less than Roborock’s own flagship. Both we found to be mavericks in the marketplace. No pre-cleaning, no cable management, just press play and let them roam. Yet, this relatively small price shift with the Qrevo Master brings a substantial drop in object detection and avoidance. I found myself chasing cable tails, and tossing shoes out of the way once again. It makes the Qrevo Master less dependable than other robovacs at this price, and harder to recommend.

Despite excellent particle performance, and advanced dock features, the reliability factor sticks with me. A $100-$300 saving might look good on paper, but in reality the time lost to recapturing cables might not be worth it.

Kitted out with FlexiArm edge mopping and vacuuming, 10,000pa suction power, and dual mops spinning at 200RPM, the Qrevo Master certainly has impressive specs with practical performance to match. In our testing the vacuum picks up 90-95% of small and medium debris on both carpet and hard flooring. While the FlexiArm Side Brush does tend to whip dander around a bit, for the most part the Qrevo finds it and sucks it up in its own time.

Mopping is a similar story. The dual spinning mops have enough grit to them to lift semi-dried wet messes like tomato sauce from hard floors. Stickier substances like maple syrup need a couple of go-overs to properly clear them. After one cycle we found there was still a thin layer of syrup on the floor once the water dried off, but one more run with a higher saturation level worked a treat.

The Master also has a dedicated FlexiArm mop head which pushes into edges and corners for a more thorough clean. It uses the same pressure and rotation along edges as it does in its central position, so the edges still get the same high quality mopping as anywhere else in the home. One issue surfaced in my hallway with a carpet runner however. Since the device is a centimetre or so higher while on the carpet, the edge vacuum brush can’t quite reach the debris on the hard floor around it, and the mops are rightfully lifted out of the way. It just makes the edge performance on mixed flooring poor. This isn’t an exclusive problem - we have found the same issue popping up across a range of robot vacuum cleaners from Dreame and Ecovacs as well. Regardless, if you’ve got a rug that sits close to a wall’s edge you may need to pull out the stick vacuum.

Like its more expensive counterpart the S8 MaxV Ultra, the Qrevo Master has a dual roller anti-tangle system. As such, it encounters the same furball dilemma we found when we reviewed the S8. The rollers don’t tangle (tick!), but instead fur and hair clump together and fall out the bottom of the device as it cleans. My stance on this hasn’t changed - I would still much rather pick up furballs than untangle and clean rollers constantly. It is also preferable to the Qrevo S’ roller-related quirk. In our testing of the cheaper Qrevo model we found the single roller would pick up medium debris and redistribute it around the house. Furballs for the win.

Roborock has top tier mapping across the board, but the Qrevo Master’s intelligence is what lets it down. Starting off on the good stuff, mapping a single story house takes just 15 minutes. Within that time the device is able to identify a range of usual household fixtures like a dining table, bed, couch, and entertainment unit, and separate out rooms. You can dive into the Roborock app to further customise the rooms, and set no-go zones, all which take seconds to accomplish. No complaints here.

Its smarts are a different story though. Don’t get me wrong, by and large the Qrevo Master is a pretty clever machine. It uses AI to detect and mark objects on your map, and successfully navigates around the vast majority of them. You can set it up to take photos of what it finds, and it can even snap pictures of your pets to varied success. It just isn’t great when it comes to smaller objects. Cables specifically. Every time I have sent the Qrevo Master around it has pulled out different cords and cables. Sometimes they get stuck in its grips, while other times it simply dislodges them from their home and I have to chase them down later. It’s frustrating, especially when you look at how that compares to other robot vacuum cleaners on the market.

Take the S8 MaxV Ultra for example. That is Roborock’s flagship model and usually retails for $300 more than the Master. It has a less effective mop, but it reliably avoids cables and cords. Or look at the Dreame X40 Ultra which is just $100 dearer than the Master. That one has entirely comparable cleaning performance, and managed to steer clear of my bundles of cords. Ultimately though, the Qrevo Master’s appetite for charging cables isn’t the real issue here, it's the price attached to it. When the majority of other devices on the market, at the same pricepoint have near-perfect object detection and avoidance, that should be the standard. In a sense I do believe that Roborock knows this. At the time of writing, the Qrevo Master comes with the Flexi Lite Wet and Dry Vacuum Cleaner, which is an equivalent value of $699. Ostensibly this brings the asking price for the Qrevo Master down to just $2,000 - a pricepoint where it would clean up the competition. As a bundle deal, this robot vacuum is excellent value, but at its asking price it is just a bit behind the curve.

The Roborock Qrevo Master costs $2,699 in Australia, but you can already grab deals that bring that price down.

When you’re paying top dollar for a robot vacuum you want it to be sharp, so from a broader industry perspective, I’m a little bit disappointed. But consumers shouldn’t discount the Qrevo Master, especially when you can get it with some bonus goodies. All in all the Master delivers great vacuuming and mopping performance, coupled with the best mapping in the biz, but it will eat your cables. If you’ve got great cable organisation then the Qrevo Master will deliver excellent, pain-free cleaning. But, if you’re a bit rougher around the edges, your experience will reflect that.