Samsung Bespoke Jet: its jet dual brush is the most versatile of the cleaning heads, moving from carpet to hard floors with a soft fluffy head and has a roller with bristles
Samsung has been doing vacuum cleaners for some time but the new Bespoke Jet cleaners certainly take the competition up a notch.
The cordless cleaner has Dyson firmly in its sights, with its digital inverter technology – which also pops up in its fridges, by the way – and a series of tools that will cover every possible cleaning scenario. It has some decent suction, coping with most of the pet hair and general debris that was scattered in its path.
The new cleaner has Samsung’s digital inverter motor, a 210W motor that is lighter than the Jet90′s version – 47 per cent lighter, according to Samsung.
The Bespoke Jet has a few different options. The standard is the Jet dual brush, a multi-floor head that will tackle carpets and hard floors, a crevice tool to get into small corners and a multi-tool that will do everything from your mattress to the sofa. Pay more and you can get the pet tool to help lift pet hair from carpets and upholstery. Go for the Pro Extra and you will also get the spray spinning sweeper that will wash your hard floors, a spare battery, the cleaning station that empties the small bin and charges the battery, and an accessories holder.
The accessories holder will hold four tools plus the spare battery; at the back of the holder, you’ll find a power port so you can charge the spare battery while you use the other one. This is a handy feature because having that spare battery makes the cleaner much more flexible.
On paper, the Samsung Bespoke Jet cleaner has an hour of cleaning, in practice, it depends on what you are using it for. A full battery will get you an hour of cleaning on the minimum setting. Bump it up to the mid setting and that battery life drops to 30 minutes. On the highest setting, you’ll get 10 minutes of suction and then you’ll need to change batteries.
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If you are using the spray-spinning sweeper head, you’ll get more than 90 minutes of cleaning out of a fully charged battery, however.
There is no auto setting, unlike rival Dyson’s vacuum cleaner, to help increase and decrease the power as needed. And it doesn’t work off a trigger either; you push the button to turn it on and off and use the plus and minus keys to increase or decrease the suction power.
A decently sized digital display gives you an indication of what mode you are in and also how long your battery will last. That means no nasty surprises while you are mid clean-up.
We have a cat who loves to kick litter around and two young children, neither of whom are known for their tidiness, so the Bespoke Jet has got a lot of use in the past few weeks. It has been used on carpet, impractical high-gloss white tiles (the bane of my life) and some shiny wooden floors and handled it all with ease.
The Jet dual brush is the most versatile of the cleaning heads, moving from carpet to hard floors with a soft fluffy head and has a roller with bristles. It picked up stray pet hair and a decent amount of dirt, although some larger pieces of debris were pulverised before they were sucked up into the bin. You do not have to swap heads as you go, which makes it ideal for quick clean-up jobs. The pet tool is designed for small jobs, covering a smaller area, but it lifts hair effectively and without matting it into an impenetrable ball.
Swap the head for the spray-spinning sweeper and it turns your vacuum into a floor mop, with dual spinning pads that take light dirt and marks off the floor. There’s a 150ml tank that you fill with water, which doesn’t seem like a lot but goes surprisingly far. A spray bottle to hand with some detergent inside does the same job at a larger capacity if needed.
It took a few tries to get the spray function working, although it didn’t require any intervention or pins to clear the nozzle; it just took perseverance.
There are also disposable pads that you can use for heavier or more distasteful jobs, but for everyday cleaning, you can simply put the reusable pads on and throw them in the wash when you are done.
When you are done with the cleaner, you can pop it on the stand, press a button and it sucks all the dust and dirt out of the cleaner and into a bag stored inside the column. No getting your hands dirty, no dust escaping into the air.
If you are looking for a multi-purpose cleaner, the Bespoke vacuum has you covered. It has enough attachments to cover almost every cleaning eventuality in the house and the performance is good enough that you won’t regret making the leap to cordless. The cleaning station makes sure all the dust is kept out of the air, holding a month or two’s worth of dust and dirt before you have to change the bag inside.
The cleaning station is quite bulky, and when you use the auto empty feature, you have to remember to close the bin afterwards or else you’ll find you are trying to vacuum the floor with the bin open, trailing dirt everywhere. It would also be handy to have a slot for charging the spare battery; while the accessories holder is handy, it means you have to find a second place to plug it in.
The spray-spinning sweeper head is good for everyday cleaning but I still had to crack out a steam cleaner on occasion to deal with more stubborn dirt. Alternatively, the disposable pads were good in this scenario, although personally, I wouldn’t want to be using them every time.
A multi-use cleaner that covers all the basics.
Ciara O'Brien is an Irish Times business and technology journalist