Worx Landroid S300 review: A modular robot mower you can upgrade

It can be hard to distinguish between most affordable robot lawn mowers by features alone, but the Worx Landroid S300 has a few things that set it apart. It’s simple to set up and operate, has a modular platform onto which you can add more features at a later date, and it charges from the side instead of the front or rear, which helps it keep the base station much tidier.

The Landroid cuts your lawn randomly, like many of the best robot lawn mowers around £400 to £500, but if you leave it to work for long enough and let it cut regularly, it will cover the whole of your garden. There’s an app you can download to your smartphone that lets you schedule and fine-tune your mowing, to help you get the best results.

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Worx Landroid S300 review: What do you get for the money?

The Worx Landroid S300 has a relatively low profile for a robot lawn mower. It’s so sleek that its chunky wheels rise above the body but its bright orange chassis is far from inconspicuous. It measures 507 x 361 x 205mm, weighs 8kg, and comes with a charging dock, a 100m roll of perimeter wire and 130 pegs to pin it all down.

It cuts your lawn with three steel blades, attached to a spinning disc on the underside of the mower, providing a cutting width of 18cm, and there are nine spare blades in the box. Cutting height can be adjusted between 20 and 50mm using a dial on the side, so you can choose any length between those two extremes. It’s steady on its wheels and is capable of operating on relatively steep inclines of up to 35%.

Worx uses a standard, easily swappable battery across many of its cordless tools, and this includes the Landroid S300. You don’t need to swap it out and share it as often as you might a power drill but, if you’ve already bought into the system, it may be useful to know that you’ve got a spare battery sitting on your lawn. Access to the battery is via a hinged lid and you can remove it without any tools.

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Worx Landroid S300 review: Is it difficult to set up?

Setting up the Worx Landroid S300 is relatively straightforward. As with all robot mowers, you have to lay out a boundary wire and peg it to the ground first, so the mower knows where to go and where not to. This wire can be up to 10cm away from a level edge, such as a sunken path, but it needs to be at least 26cm away from awkward edges such as walls and flower beds.

Each of the two ends of the boundary wire feed into the charging station from opposite sides, tucking into the mower’s parking plate (a plastic mesh that lets the grass grow through it) and connecting into simple grip connectors on the front of the station. It has a long 10m mains lead, too, so you shouldn’t struggle to get it to an outdoor electricity socket that’s reasonably close by.

Setting up the mower is done through the app. This was a smooth process, but your phone and the mower have to be able to connect to the same 2.4GHz Wi-Fi network. This can cause a bit of trouble if your router is configured to push your smartphone onto its faster 5GHz network. Once connected, I had to download and install an update via the app, but this was a straightforward process and didn’t take too long.

Worx Landroid S300 review: How well does it mow the lawn?

The app can create a variety of schedules and multi-zone areas, either manually or using its own automatic detection. The robot cuts the lawn in a random pattern so, at its simplest, you can set a start time and duration for it to head out, and choose which days of the week to do it.

However, you can take this a step further, using the automated settings based on the size of your lawn – you can measure this in the app – and the type of grass and soil you have. It will schedule its mows accordingly, allowing you to remove times or days you don’t want it to operate. It’s also possible to set areas of your lawn based on distance around your perimeter wire, which helps the mower get in and out of difficult areas.

Because of the distance the wire needs to be from tricky boundaries, you’ll end up with an uncut edge, which I measured at about 16cm, so you’ll still need to tackle these with a mower or strimmer. You won’t need to do this around the base station, however, because the side-charging design means the area around the charging station stays as well trimmed as the rest of the lawn.

One thing to note is that, out of the box, the Landroid S300 can’t see its surroundings, so you’ll need to keep your lawn clear of children’s toys and pets. It will happily bump into more permanent fixtures, such as trees or washing lines, and turn around when it meets them. And Worx’s modular system means you can add collision detection further down the line as and when funds permit. It’s pricey, though, at a relatively expensive £200.

Other additional modules are available that provide voice control, extend Wi-Fi coverage, add no-go zones and include long-range tracking to protect against theft.

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Worx Landroid S300 review: Should I buy it?

The Worx Landroid S300 made a great job of keeping my lawn trimmed. Its large wheels can move around the garden without wearing down the lawn and the app provides a lot of intelligence to compensate for the mower’s random movements. It delivers a great balance between price and performance, especially at the new lower price of £400.

However, it will still go over your grass time and again, often unnecessarily, thanks to its random movement. If you’d prefer to avoid this, take a look at the Bosch Indego S+ 500, which stores a map of your lawn and cuts it in a more methodical manner. And if you want collision detection as standard, it’s worth checking out the Yard Force Compact 400Ri, which comes with it as standard for only £480 all in.