Review: Dyson Omni-Glide

Dyson has carved out a pretty unique niche in the higher end of the home appliance industry. The company has a long history of turning plebeian products—air purifiers, hair dryers, vacuums—into exquisite, insanely priced prestige items that somehow always perform better than advertised.

Every year, I wonder if this will be the year Dyson jumps the shark and we all simultaneously realize that it is complete madness to spend up to $700 on one of the company's vacuums. I thought surely this year’s Omni-glide, the company’s newest stick vacuum, would be it. The basic premise is absurd. The name describes a vacuum that can be pushed in any direction and that is primarily for use on hardwood floors. 

But as far as I knew, all vacuums go in all directions. Don't they? And I already use all of Dyson's vacuums on hardwood. 

Well, butter my butt and call me a biscuit, because the Omni-glide has quickly become my favorite Dyson appliance. Even compared to Dyson's previous stick vacs, I had no idea a floor vacuum could be this light, maneuverable, and useful for picking up the utter destruction that can result from serving my kids berry cake for snack. Darn it, Dyson, you’ve done it again.

Currently, I have the Omni-glide plugged in next to the Dyson V15 Detect, which is the latest cordless stick vacuum in Dyson's popular V-series line. The V-series are already pretty light and small, but the Omni-glide is about half its size. It’s 3.5 feet tall and weighs 4 pounds.

The style in which you operate the Omni-glide is distinctive and clever. Every single other cordless vacuum I’ve tried uses a trigger that you activate with a pointer finger, much like squirting a water gun at your floor.

However, the Omni-glide turns on with a button on the stem. Then you hold the handle like a wand. This design also uses a unique, pivoting head. The neck is a long, flexible, supported spring that can rotate a full 360 degrees. On the bottom of the vacuum, the head has two soft rollers and four tiny casters that also allow the head to swivel around in any direction.

The difference between using an Omni-glide and a regular cordless stick vacuum is like transferring from a rollaboard carry-on suitcase with two wheels to one with four. Instead of awkwardly executing a 10-point turn to maneuver it into the airport bathroom stall with you, you can easily push it to make it slide in ahead of you.

Of course, since the Omni-glide is much smaller than the average stick vacuum, that means both the battery and the dust bin are smaller. It has an incredibly tiny bin capacity of 0.05 gallons; in comparison, the still quite svelte V15 has a bin capacity of 0.2 gallons, which is four times larger. I didn’t find the small bin size to be an issue, since my house is mostly carpeted and I mainly used the Omni-glide to tidy up our kitchen and dining room after meals. This might be something to consider, though, if all of your floors are hardwood.

Battery life is a paltry 20 minutes. I was able to test this inadvertently because we recently moved into a new house and I didn't realize that one particular wall socket in our new home didn't work. I only learned the Omni-glide wasn't charging when it died after using it to pick up after meals for several days in a row. 

Since then, I’ve found a working outlet and it charges back to full whenever it's docked. Surprisingly, since then, I’ve never had to use it for the full 20 minutes. When a vacuum is this easy to maneuver, you don’t waste precious battery time wrestling it into the exact right spot next to the chair, under the table, or in the corner.

Though the Omni-glide, like many a Dyson stick vac, uses the company's signature “cyclone” motor to suck debris up into the bagless bin through a proprietary filter, it’s obviously far from Dyson’s most powerful model. Even smaller debris, like icky strings peeled off a clementine, needed a second pass to pick up.

The Omni-glide has an unconventional handle for a stick vac; grip it like a broom and swish it around.

Photograph: Dyson

No matter how much I might let most household tasks slide, there’s something about having crumbs stick to the bottoms of my feet that makes me feel like my family lives in squalor. Unfortunately, I also have small children that leave trails of crumby destruction in their wake. It’s not as if it’s tremendously difficult to get the broom and dustpan after a snack time blowout. But it is an annoying task to complete manually, several times a day.

The Omni-glide has made this onerous, repetitive task easier. Enjoyable, actually. It’s so incredibly effortless to maneuver the vacuum around the kitchen table by merely flicking my wrist, rather than trying to sweep all the muffin crumbs into a pile that my 4-year-old will inevitably stomp through on his way to the bathroom. The roller head is so small that I don’t even have to pull the furniture out all the way.

Of course, the obvious point here is that a $400 floor vacuum that’s exclusively designed for use on hardwood floors is a luxury. Although you can switch out the head to use it as a hand vacuum, it's not strong or big enough for your carpets. Very few people want to live in a carpetless home that echoes like a giant bathroom, so the Omni-glide would most often function as a secondary vacuum. And yes, $400 is an insane price for a supplementary stick vac.

However, if you also find yourself in a tedious cycle of cleaning up gross kitchens, dining rooms, or bathrooms, the Omni-glide can be a smart addition to your vacuum quiver. I have used it several times a day for months now, and its compactness and maneuverability have made my life infinitely easier. I even used it to clean crumbs off the kitchen table’s chairs the other day.

Now if only Dyson could make a soft vacuum to use directly on toddlers’ bodies, I would be completely set.