Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra review: A cordless, self-emptying stick that vacuums and mops

We’ve seen plenty of self-emptying vacuums in the robot category, but the Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra marks the first time we’ve seen such a concept in a cordless vacuum cleaner.

It comes with all the usual attachments and trimmings, but also has a tall stand, which Samsung calls the Clean Station. Place the vacuum into the Clean Station, press the button on the front, and the contents of the collection bin are cleanly and effortlessly vacuumed into a disposable bag hidden inside the stand.

If you were buying a Samsung Bespoke Jet Pet, that would be the end of the story – and you’d probably be quietly impressed. However, we were sent a Bespoke Jet Pro Extra to review, so we’ll be examining Samsung’s latest flagship cleaner in a lot more detail.

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Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra review: What do you get for the money?

There are four Samsung Bespoke Jet models in the range. None of them can be described as particularly basic, but the cheapest model is the Bespoke Jet Pet (£599). This comes with the cordless stick vacuum cleaner, the Clean Station, a dual-roller floor head that’s standard across the range, and a good selection of attachments. These include a pet tool for upholstery, a combi tool for dusting and funnelling larger items, a crevice tool for smaller spaces, and a flexible tool for getting into awkward angles.

The next step up is the Bespoke Jet Complete, which is exclusive to Samsung’s website and costs £799. This comes with an additional Slim Action brush, which is easier to manoeuvre around smaller spaces, though I didn’t receive one with my review model, so can’t tell you whether it’s any good or not.

The third option is the Bespoke Jet Complete Extra, which costs £899. This is essentially the same as the Complete, except that it comes with an additional battery, which is useful for cleaning larger spaces that might otherwise require a charge in the middle.

Lastly we have the model we’re reviewing here, the Bespoke Jet Pro Extra. This also costs £899, but swaps the Slim Action brush of the Complete Extra with the Spray Spinning Sweeper mop attachment. It also comes with two batteries.

Clearly, this is a premium range of vacuum cleaners, costing more than even Dyson’s priciest models. As ever, though, it pays to shop around. In the weeks before finalising this review, we found the various models selling at hefty discounts at various major retailers and, at the time of writing, Samsung’s own website was offering discounts between £100 and £150 across the pricier models in the range.

All models come with the Clean Station, an accessory stand for storing some of the included accessories, and the main Jet Dual Brush floor head. This has two rollers – the main carpet roller, which has both brushes and rubber fins, and a thin soft roller at the front for working on hard floor.

The vacuum cleaner is svelte and light, weighing 2.7kg and measuring 250 x 210 x 1,000mm (WDH). The extension wand actually has three height settings, though I found it was about normal sized when in its longest position, which adds an extra 130mm onto its height. Its collection bin, meanwhile, has a capacity of 0.5 litres.

The bulkiest component is the Clean Station. This stands on a circular base, plugs into a wall socket, and measures 300 x 300 x 850mm (WDH). It has a space in the top that you place the vacuum’s collection bin into, which you can do without removing the extension wand, as it sits independently at the front. This will charge the battery and, if you push the button on the rim of the Clean Station, empty the vacuum into the bag that’s concealed inside.

There are some consumables in the box, but you’ll need to purchase more. The Clean Station comes with three bags, one installed and two spare. These have a capacity of 2 litres, so can empty the cleaner at least four times. It will almost certainly work out to more than this in real life, though, because you’ll inevitably empty the cleaner even if it’s not full to capacity.

Replacement bags are available from Samsung for £19 (five bags, which works out to £3.80 each). Note that these are paper bags but they have a plastic and rubber connector and seal, so might be disappointing to anyone trying to keep an eye on how much non-biodegradable waste they create.

The mop also uses consumables. It comes with two standard reusable microfibre pads, which you can pop in the washing machine after use, and two disposable wet pads that you can use once and throw away. The mop uses two pads at a time. Replacing the reusable pads costs £14 for four pads. The disposable pads come in packs of two for £9.

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Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra review: What’s it like to use?

As you’d expect from a Samsung product (and a device of this price) the build quality is wonderful, and everything clips together neatly and easily. The controls are really simple, with just a physical on-off button, and touch controls marked with a plus and minus. The latter buttons are used to cycle through the power settings. There are four levels – Min, Med, Max and Jet.

Pushing the vacuum around both carpet and hard floor is a smooth and satisfying experience. The device isn’t too heavy, and the weight is relatively well balanced between the vacuum unit and the floor head, so it’s neither top heavy nor insubstantial at the base.

While the cleaner is pleasant to use, the highlight of the package is arguably the Clean Station. Although it takes up quite a lot of space and is an imposing presence, it does at least double up as storage. The real benefit, however, is the dust-free emptying.

This system completely eliminates the dust cloud produced by most cordless stick vacuums. Where most rivals require you to wallop the collection bin while holding it over your bin, the Clean Station’s powerful vacuum cleanly sucks the collection bin dry and deposits its contents into its bag.

All this can be done with the extension wand and floor head still attached, though tall people will have to shorten the wand first, which is mildly annoying. The collection bin then connects to the main unit at the top without any further dismantling.

The other cordless stick vacuum we’ve reviewed recently that offers similar dust-free emptying is the Henry Quick (£250). This uses bags in the collection bin to store the dirt, rather than a separate emptying system. The benefit of this is that these bags can be jettisoned straight into the dustbin, containing all the dirt and keeping the inside of the vacuum comparatively pristine.

The Halo Capsule (£200) also uses bags in the cleaner itself, with the added benefit that they’re made from compostable paper and cardboard, so they’re better for the environment. The Halo Capsule didn’t perform as well as its rivals in our tests, though, so the Samsung and Henry are better options in raw performance terms.

Another function of the Clean Station is that it’s also a charger. After you’ve emptied the vacuum, simply leave it in position and the battery charges back to full capacity.

While we’re on the subject of charging, there’s also the accessory cradle. This is a tree-like plastic stand that can hold four attachments – two on the base and two hanging from its branches. There’s also a slot for the secondary battery and it includes a charging cable, so you can plug it into a wall socket and have your secondary battery charged and ready for action, too.

The only downside of the cradle is that all of the models except for the basic Bespoke Jet Pet come with more accessories than there are places to keep them.

A key selling point of the Pro Extra model that we’ve reviewed here is that it comes with the mopping floor head. This doesn’t offer any simultaneous suction, like some robot mops do, but blocks the vacuum at the base. Instead, the motor is used to drive a pump, which can squirt a quick spray of water ahead of it, which comes from a tiny 150ml reservoir you can fill with tap water.

The mop has two pads which spin at 260rpm. I tested it by following the muddy paws of a puppy around hard floor and it made short work of such fresh, lightly-trodden dirt. A quick squirt of water (which is initiated by pressing the ‘plus’ button) is enough to moisten the pads and wipe up. The reusable pads we tested also did a good job of soaking up water spilled around the puppy’s bowl.

Dried on splashes were more problematic, but such stains can be lifted from a smooth hard floor by going over them several times. However, it would probably be quicker to grab a floor cloth and tackle tougher stains manually.

I also tested it on another hard floor that has more texture to it, but there isn’t really enough downward pressure or agitation here to tackle dry dirt that’s caught in the ridges.

Overall, the mop is a useful tool to have on hand for a quick wipe-up, but it’s not going to replace a mop and bucket. Serious spillages will need more work than this can provide, and there will be times when you want to use a cleaning chemical with a bit more power than tap water.

Maintenance is relatively straightforward. The bag is easy to remove from the Clean Station when it’s full, and all the components of the collection bin can be rinsed under running tap water, including the filters.

One thing that’s lacking, however, is any attempt at automatic hair detangling. This is becoming increasingly common on many vacuum cleaners and removes the slightly unpleasant task of having to occasionally cut wrapped-around hair from your vacuum’s roller bar. It didn’t get tangled as quickly and thoroughly as some vacuums we’ve tested in the past, but it was starting to build up as I was testing the device.

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Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra review: How well does it clean?

When it comes to suction power, the Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra has a lot in common with the top Dyson V15 Detect (£630), which is practically the same price. Both vacuums are capable of sucking so hard that their engines cut out, assuming a blockage, when tested with our pressure gauge. In the chart below, both the Samsung and Dyson readings are as high as the unit will go before cutting out.

For the sake of comparison across all our charts, I’ve also included the Miele HX2 (£549), because it’s another highly regarded brand with a similar price, and the Henry Quick (£250), because although it’s half the price and significantly more basic, it does offer dust-free emptying, which is arguably one of Samsung’s key selling points.

As you can see from the chart below, both the Miele and Henry devices fall well behind in this test, though there’s more to a decent vacuum cleaner than how hard it sucks.It’s a similar story with airflow, which we test with an anemometer – in Jet mode it flows so fast it tips off the end of the measurement scale, though the airflow in the weakest Min mode was lower than the minimum airflow you can expect from a Dyson V15 Detect on its Eco setting.

The real test is how well the vacuum manages picking up spillages. To test this we drop measured amounts of flour and Cheerios on both hard floor and carpet. By weighing the collection bin before and after a single pass, we can see how capable the vacuum is at picking stuff up and compare its performance to every other model we’ve tested.

I started the Bespoke Jet Pro Extra with one of the toughest tests – Cheerios on hard floor. However, I had high hopes, because vacuums with soft rollers at the front of their floor heads are the most likely to succeed in this test, often to the point of near perfection.

It was surprising, then, to see it gather some of the Cheerios, but push many ahead of its floor head and fail to capture them. It collected only 31% of the spillage on a single pass, which is disappointing.

The problem is that the Bespoke Jet’s soft roller is narrower than those found on better-performing models from Dyson and Shark – and a thinner roller provides less opportunity to trap larger particles such as Cheerios in its fluffy grip.

Moving on to carpet, the increased friction allowed the soft roller to do its job, trapping the Cheerios between the floor and the roller, and into the path of the vacuum’s suction. As a result it performed much better, perfectly in fact, collecting every last Cheerio crumb.

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Flour is a tough challenge on any surface, but the Samsung Bespoke Jet excelled here, collecting 98% of flour from both hard floor and carpet, leaving us having to look closely to find any remaining residue in either case.

As you can see from the chart below, this is a good performance. It’s not quite as brilliant as the Dyson V15 Detect overall, but if you take out the troublesome Cheerios on hard floor, it actually performs more strongly than the Dyson, which left more flour and Cheerios behind in short pile carpet tests.

It outperformed the more expensive Miele whether you count the Cheerio hard floor fail or not. It’s also better than the Henry Quick, which has the disadvantage of lacking a hard floor roller, even if it is half the price of the Samsung.Battery life is excellent. In our chart, below, you’ll notice that the life of a single battery is slightly below that of the Dyson V15 Detect, both in its strongest and its most economical settings. However, because you get two batteries in the box, and they’re easily interchangeable, the overall battery life is effectively doubled. That means the Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra could still be running a long time after all its rivals have been returned to their charging stations.

Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra review: Should I buy it?

The Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra wants for nothing. If you love the idea of the self-emptying design and its various other extras, this expensive flagship vacuum is a highly capable all-rounder.

The only vacuum cleaner that’s more powerful is the Dyson V15 Detect (£630), though our tests show it’s a marginal advantage. The downsides of the Dyson’s design is that the floor head needs to be manually switched to transition between hard floor and carpet, it normally comes with a single battery by default, and emptying the bin creates clouds of dust.

If you can’t afford to spend the best part of a thousand pounds on a vacuum cleaner, though, then there are some worthy alternatives. For instance, the Henry Quick (£250) is a far more affordable option. Its basic cleaning head isn’t as powerful as either the Samsung or Dyson models, but its bagged design produces less mess than bagless rivals.

Despite its relatively high price, though, the Samsung Bespoke Jet Pro Extra may still be the right luxury model for some – and especially if it can be found at a discount. It’s well designed, powerful and equipped with a range of useful extras including a mop, accessory tree and extra battery. Factor in its Dyson-rivalling performance, and this flagship vacuum cleaner is far better value than it might initially appear.

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