9/21/07 Roomba Anyone?

I'm going to let ya'll in on a little secret. I'm a bad housekeeper. It's not like my house is a total sty or a threat to public health, but if that Swifter testing crew suddenly showed up unannounced one day, they'd have a field day. I'd like to claim that it's just because I'm so busy that I don't have time to vacuum, but the truth is, it's boring, and I'd rather do something more interesting like watch Lobster Wars on the Discovery Channel. (Did anybody see what happened to that guy's hand on last night's episode? Yikes!) Anyway, every year or so, right around the time that the cat hair starts coating everything in a fine film of fur, and the dust bunnies under the bed start organizing their own system of government, and the floor of my bathroom has enough stray strands of hair on it to qualify as the new Hair Club for Men president, I start looking for easy cleaning solutions for lazy people like myself. What I'd really like is a maid service, but it turns out that it's hard to find someone willing to clean your house for free. (Where's the passion for your jobs people?!?) So I'm forced to look into robotic help, which under the list of pros, do not require a key to the house, or health insurance, and can't mock my New Dust Bunny Republic behind my back. We've got the Bisell Spotbot already, and it has SAVED OUR LIVES. Trust me on this. I'll write a glowing review of it later. Partly because of the success we've had with the SpotBot, I've been looking at the iRobot robotic vacuums. I've been following these Roombas since they first came out, but I've held off on getting one because the reviews were only so-so, and who wants to drop a couple hundred bucks on a so-so product? (They keep getting stuck in a corner. They lose battery too fast. They get lost. They don't pick up anything.) So for now, my Dust Bunny Republic is safe. But every year I look them up again, and they usually have a new version which fixes one of the complaints from the reviews.

The latest versions of the iRobot Roomba is the Roomba 570, which the website claims has improved navigation and floor coverage, edge and corner dusting, better anti-tangle technology, automatically returns to its charging base to recharge itself, and can be scheduled to start cleaning at a pre-set time (like after you've gone to work). This one is so new, however, that I can't find any product reviews on it. It's also a whopping $400, which I'm not quite ready to shell out, although I'm hoping that the new one makes last year's models a lot cheaper. So I'm curious. Does anyone out there have a Roomba or know someone who does? How did it work out? Would you recommend it to someone else? Does it really have the ability to suck up a blanket of cat fur and annihilate the Dust Bunny Nation? 'Cause Christmas is exactly 96 days away, and my campaign to get free maid service hasn't exactly amounted to anything yet.