Mova P70 Pro Ultra Review: Strong Suction, Busy App

Robot vacuum prices have fallen sharply over the past few years, yet recent models with a genuinely complete specification remain relatively uncommon at the more accessible end of the market. The Mova P70 Pro Ultra belongs to that smaller group, and it arrives with a feature list that would not look out of place further up the range.

The headline figures are 30,000 Pa of suction and a pair of rotating mop pads to scrub the floor. Those pads have clearly received the most engineering attention: they are pressed down with 12 N of force, they extend outwards on the MaxiReach system to work closer to edges, and they are washed and dried at the base station.

That base station also recharges the robot and refills its clean-water tank, while emptying the dirty-water tank and collecting debris into a bag. For navigation, the P70 Pro Ultra combines LiDAR, a camera and object recognition covering a claimed 280-plus objects.

Straight out of the box the impression is a good one. The dock is relatively restrained in design despite its brushed stainless-steel effect cover, and it should find a home without difficulty. It is not something that needs installing in the middle of a living room, as manufacturer imagery oddly tends to suggest, but nor is it something that has to be hidden away.

The robot itself does not reinvent the category. It is round and white, with a black version also offered, and carries the familiar small turret on top. It is a shape that has been seen many times over, largely because nothing better has yet emerged. A few buttons on the upper surface pause a clean, send the robot back to its dock, or start a spot clean over a square area measuring 1.5 m on each side.

Assembly poses no problems. The dock is plugged in, the small access ramp is clipped on, and the robot is placed on its pad to begin configuration through the app. Pairing goes through without any real difficulty, which is not always a given.

During the first few sessions the MOVAhome app can be daunting. The home screen for the robot is a busy one: alongside the map, once the home has been surveyed, sit no fewer than twelve buttons that can be activated.

As a result, the interface is not mastered in a handful of uses, and finding the right setting, option or dial sometimes means wandering through a dense menu tree, because one tap very often opens another page filled edge to edge with buttons and toggles of every kind. The labels are admittedly very clear and contextual bubbles explain what each change does, but the whole thing would have benefited from more restraint. Newcomers risk feeling lost in the face of so many possibilities and going no further than a few basic functions. Experienced users, on the other hand, will find they can configure the P70 Pro Ultra in the finest detail.

In everyday use the essentials are reached simply enough: specifying an area to clean, launching a pad-cleaning cycle, or changing suction power and washing intensity. Whether the average user really needs to set side-brush frequency across three levels is another matter, though an excess of options is preferable to too few.

The docking station carries a 4-litre clean-water tank and a 3.5-litre dirty-water container, so topping up and emptying are largely automated and rarely demand attention. Both tanks are reached easily from the top of the station, which simplifies the job considerably.

One omission stands out. Rather than a bagless dust collector, Mova has stayed with a bag, so that consumable has to be replaced, with the drawbacks that brings in terms of running cost and, above all, recycling.

The mop pads are washed automatically, so they need little routine thought. They still have to be detached from time to time for a machine wash, but a magnetic mounting that is neither too strong nor too loose makes that about as simple as it could be.

The robot itself is not much harder to look after. The small 300 ml dust bin sits beneath the upper cover, which opens easily when needed, and that is also where the HEPA filter is found. With no foam pre-filter or other barrier in front of it, the filter clogs very quickly and ideally wants dusting down after each cleaning session — though this is true of every robot vacuum in the comparative test group used for these measurements.

The rubber-finned brush underneath holds no unpleasant surprises. The part retaining the roller comes off without tools before the roller is rinsed under water; it is hard to make that simpler. There is, however, no system to stop long hair winding around the brush. In use, hair gathered to the left of the roller, between it and the drive, and a single part had to be removed to clear it, with no cutting tool required. Had the hair been pushed to the right instead, removing it would very likely have been far more awkward.

The map produced at the end of the survey run looks precise, marking out even the legs of a slim designer table, and that sets expectations high for how the P70 Pro Ultra moves around a home.

In practice the robot covers its whole working area efficiently and without going over the same spot unnecessarily, unless the user has asked for exactly that. It also moves easily beneath furniture and chairs, and curtains do not disturb it unduly. Skirting boards, external angles and corners are less convincing, since the test sawdust laid down in those strategic places was not picked up satisfactorily.

In the same vein, obstacles on the floor are sometimes skirted at the widest possible distance. There was almost certainly room to work a little closer around a shoe, a cable or a sock left lying on the floor.

Suction is where the P70 Pro Ultra makes its case most emphatically.

With no change to the default settings, the robot removed 91% of the debris laid on thin carpet. Pushed harder, that rose to 93% — a figure comparable with some very capable cordless stick vacuums. On hard floors the results were better still, and all of the debris spread out was eliminated in a single pass.

The explanation is most likely raw suction power. In the grooved test surface, the P70 Pro Ultra extracted 10% of the trapped fine dust in automatic mode and 16% in boost mode. That is the strongest result recorded by any robot vacuum in the comparative test group used for these measurements.

The P70 Pro Ultra will not be enough on its own to make a floor gleam — no robot mop is — and ingrained dirt in particular remains beyond it, but it goes about the task seriously.

The first thing to note is that the extending mop pads do their job properly. They are entirely capable of reaching marks close to skirting boards and in corners.

Oil and fizzy-drink marks came away without difficulty. Ketchup put up more resistance and was still faintly visible after the machine had passed over it. Indian ink was not fully lifted either and remained clearly perceptible.

Endurance sits around the average for the comparative test group.

After a recharge lasting a little over 3 hours 30 minutes in standard mode, the robot ran for 180 minutes without returning to its dock, which is enough to keep a sizeable property in order. In maximum mode, endurance inevitably falls, but it still reaches 1 hour 30 minutes.

Competition in the robot vacuum market is fierce, and even at this level of the market there are comparably recommendable machines such as the Dreame L40s Pro Ultra and the Eureka J15 Pro Ultra. Those models are beginning to show their age, however, and may well disappear from shelves before long.