M-288 Robotic vacuum cleaner is one of the cheapest robotic vacuum you can find which comes with a self charging home base, remote and virtual wall. It resembles Original iRobot Roomba.

M-288 is a truly cheap robotic vacuum. Can be found as cheap as $99 at eBay. But how does it compare to iRobot Roomba models? Do you get what you payed for or a good deal?

First impression is that the bottom of the unit resembles original iRobot Roomba units. The top of the unit also resembles it. There are buttons called spot, clean and max similar to 2nd generation iRobot Roomba models. However these buttons do not have the same functions as the iRobot models. Spot button causes the unit to work for 4 minutes and clean button causes the unit to work for 30 minutes and max button causes the unit to work until the battery is drained.

Unit comes with a self charging home base and a remote control. The remote is quite useless, the unit doesnt have good reception and it is difficult to route the unit using the remote. The self charging home base has some other problems. The unit doesnt automatically detect it when cleaning, it only returns to the home base if the batteries are drained.

The charging system of the unit also seems to be defective. After the unit says it is fully charged it still continues charging, determined by the warmness of the battery and the self charging home base shows the battery charging at all times. I havent seen it ever show the battery full, perhaps after an extended period of time it might change to full.

The standart battery that unit comes with is a cheap NI-CD 1500mAh battery. It seems to last quite good but not suitable if you are using the clean function as these batteries have memory effect unless drained completely before recharging.

How does the unit's cleaning compare with iRobot Roomba? First of all this unit doesnt follow walls as advertised in its specifications. There is a wall following sensor however when it bumps to a wall it turns and goes a little bit forward and bumps again (quite dumb really). The cleaning patterns doesnt seem to be as effective as in original iRobot Roomba models. Yet, it finds and cleans a lot of dirt eventually.

Does it worth the $99 price? I doubt it as one can get original roomba scheduler models for $150 on eBay nowadays. Why buy a $99 product which doesnt have any kind of service anywhere when you can pay slightly more for the real thing. However if you are looking for the cheapest possible robotic vacuum this one will do.