Mova Z50 Ultra reviewed: a challenger

A different vacuum dock complete with actual floor cleaning could make the Mova Z50 Ultra a solid challenger in the robo-vac space, if only it could overcome some frustrating bugs.

“Dad, the vacuum is doing it again,” Ms 8 would call out from the living room, staring at the robot stopped outside of its charging dock. She’s right. It had done it again: the robot had refused to finish the way it was supposed to: charging safely, comfortably in its dock.

We were reviewing a new vacuum from an arrival to the Australian market. There are many. Oh my, there are many.

A flood of robotic vacuums have hit our patch of land on the underside of the world, and many of them look like the same thing:

Circular robots with vacuum chambers, sweeper brushes, and a mopping system, almost every robotic vacuum goes with the same look and a similar style of dock. They even sport similar apps, with a start screen, mapping, AI guidance, and smart home integration.

The Mova Z50 is no different — the vacuum itself and its app remind this reviewer of the Roborock Qrevo Edge we reviewed recently — but its dock is a little different, and comes with a possibly easier to understand design.

And yet the Mova Z50 offers something a little bit different in its approach, provided it can just make it a few more steps inside its home, overcoming what is clearly a bug in its programming.

What is the Mova Z50 Ultra?

Another of the many, many robotic vacuums making their way out to market, Mova’s Z50 Ultra is from a brand we’ve not heard of prior.

Circular and able to roam the floor using cameras, sensors, rollers, sweepers, and suction, an initial glance at the Z50 Ultra and you’d write it off as yet another of the same robo-vacs you can see everywhere. Another variation on the theme.

Take a closer look, and you’ll see it’s a little bit different, starting with the base design, which offers three columns for each of the parts you’ll need to maintain: clean water, dirty water, and a bag for holding all the gunk you vacuum up.

It’s a little different from the horizontal bag we normally see, and Mova includes a latch to hold each section shut, plus a brush to help clean things up when emptying the bag.

The inclusion of water tanks tell you that Mova’s Z50 Ultra is also a mop alongside the robotic vacuum side of things, but so does an extra component found just behind the clean water tank: a detergent cartridge. Plug it in and the Z50 Ultra will clean the floor with something other than just hot water.

To do its job, though, the Z50 Ultra includes a four litres of water (4.5L for clean, 4L for dirty), a suction power of 19,000Pa, and a camera system featuring LiDAR and AI to understand obstacles, avoid them, skip wires, and even try to dodge dogs and cats.

Daisy the Golden Retriever stands at the ready, and her endless shedding will surely give any vacuum a good test. Expect hair. Lots and lots of hair.

What does it do?

Like other robotic vacuum cleaners, the point of the Z50 Ultra is to deal with your floors and the maintenance of cleaning the house.

This isn’t for the big mess your kids just made dropping corn flakes on the floor, nor is it for you accidentally knocking a glass of wine. Rather, robotic vacuum cleaners are more for regular maintenance, dealing with dust and small debris that naturally builds up on the floor from use, while also mopping the floor at the same time.

Mova’s Z50 Ultra handles that with ease, and thanks to its inclusion of a dock with a tank of actual cleaning product, manages to properly clean the floor, too. It’s not just a smell, like some other vacuums release, but rather actual cleaning product, found inside of a tank hidden behind the clean water container, which like the rest of the unit is installed vertically.

The cleaning product — the detergent, really — does leave a faint smell that fades as it’s exposed, providing a slight whiff of something chemical and plasticky. I guess you at least know your floors are cleaned with more than just the water it gets from those tanks and then heats up.

Your tanks are clean water, dirty water, and a vacuum tank with a bag inside a design that differs from the usual approach of vacuum bag in the middle underneath two tanks for water, dirty and clean. It’s just that little bit different to be refreshing in aesthetic, and the black and gold trim makes it look neat, too.

Turn it on and you’ll be hear some piano starting it up, as well as a surprisingly loud voice taking you through any setup or instructions. It’s relatively easy, and will see you turning to your phone, scanning a code, connecting the vacuum to your network, and then letting the robotic vacuum map your house to work out where it should clean.

You’ll end up with a tidy map, and then you’re ready to clean, either the whole house or just a few rooms, dealer’s choice.

Does it do the job?

When it works, the Z50 Ultra works loudly, almost to the tune of singing at the top of its lungs. Like a cat desperate to let you hear the song of its people, the Z50 Ultra sings as it moves, an electronic sound made up of rolling wheels and suction sounds.

This is not a very quiet vacuum, though it is one that definitely does a good job.

As it moves back and forth, walking the grid like a character from a Jeffery Deaver novel pacing the crime scene that is your home, it brushes dust and hair into the path of its suction, while mopping the floor behind it. The result is excellent, and your floors are clean.

This really is a great vacuum.

Sometimes, however, the Mova Z50 Ultra struggles to finish the job, getting stuck as it returns to base.

We wish this was a simple problem that happened in small amounts, but the Z50 Ultra almost never managed to dock itself, and would frequently stop just outside its base.

It reminded this reviewer of a scene in “Happy Gilmore” where Adam Sandler is yelling at his ball to go home, pleading with it. Similar moments occurred as this reviewer pleaded with a robotic vacuum, noting that its home was literally right there, and all it had to do was go in. It just wouldn’t.

The Mova Z50 definitely could have. Nothing was stopping it.

If you run the app, you’ll find you can trigger its response to go home, and throughout its cleaning process, it would also go home. But at the end, almost every time it was used, it would literally stop short.

And if you forgot about it, the Mova Z50 Ultra would run out of battery power mere centimetres from its home.

What does it need?

It can be maddening; how can a robotic vacuum that cleans the floor this well struggle with a bug this severe? And yet it kept on happening. Over and over again, when the Z50 Ultra was this close to finishing, it would show how close it was by stopping.

In what is clearly a bug — because it can get home — the Z50 Ultra struggled to finish the job. If the developers are reading this, please roll out a patch urgently, both for this quirk and for the sound, which is loud.

There are times when that bug seemingly also prevented the Z50 Ultra from leaving its dock to start. Trigger the vacuum from the app to clean a few rooms, and after cleaning its mop pad and telling you about it rather loudly, the robo-vac would roll out from its dock, and then just stop.

You’d come out to get a cup of tea and find it had merely stopped instead of starting, pulling out your phone and pressing the “play” button to push it back on its way.

At times, the robotic vacuum was almost a literal interpretation of how many people feel on a Monday. Like it just… can’t. There’s a line in the cult classic Office Space for this. Had our vacuum developed a bad case of the Mondays?

Bugs are normal for gadgets, by the way. We’re not sitting here suggesting a bug-free world is even remotely going to happen. Devices get bugs, and eventually programming teams patch them up.

But consistent bugs demand attention, and these are consistent problems for the Mova Z50 Ultra, a vacuum that cleans really well provided it can get itself home for a recharge regularly. It’s a good vacuum marred by programming.

Is it worth your money?

The inclusion of cleaning product makes the Z50 Ultra slightly more compelling than other robotic vacuums, as well. By inclusion alone, it literally solves one of the questions we’ve been asking at the launch of robotic vac-mop combos that almost every company has been downplaying.

The typical response is water does a perfectly fine job, and that if you want to buy a cleaning product you can, but it’s not required.

Roborock, by comparison, used to have a cleaning product made with cleaning brand Omo, but that has since been replaced with its own. Mova’s is clearly its own, but it comes with the machine in a special tank.

Cleaning solution has to be used on the Z50 Ultra, with Mova essentially drawing a line in the sand and saying “cleaning product is a part of the job of mopping”, something you’ve always known but robo-mop brands have been a little reluctant to agree on.

That alone gives the Mova Z50 Ultra something different in the market.

It’s a shame the cleaning product is a proprietary tank, but one problem at a time, and it’s only a $30 replacement, no different from you needing extra mopping pads or vacuum bags, the consumables of simply owning a robotic vacuum cleaner.

The bigger problem is perhaps the price: at $2999 in Australia, the Z50 Ultra seems too high a price for a machine with bugs. Our vacuums go in the same place for review, and yet they’ve never done this, suggesting bugs.

Robotic vacuums sitting at the top of their game tend to be a $3K gadget, and the Mova Z50 Ultra is technically that on paper. The problem is on paper, you can’t see the faults. We’d probably push a few hundred off simply because of these problems, bringing it close to $2000 or $2400.

Yay or nay?

On the day we were due to publish this review, the Z50 Ultra actually returned home after cleaning. It was a total surprise, especially given we expected to have it kick it back to base while walking past. But no, it had managed to surprise, as if the bug knew we were thinking about it.

The problem is that bug happened too often to count. Even the kids would point and jeer.

“Dad, it’s doing it again.”

If Mova can fix the bugs, then the Z50 Ultra could be the challenger it needs to be: a vacuum that isn’t trying to be the same and stands out. This may even be something over-the-air updates deal with perfectly.

The Mova Z50 Ultra has all the hallmarks of a challenger and cleans exceptionally well. It just needs to finish the job and go home.