This is a great all around vacuum. It has a few annoyances, but overall, it's great. First, the positive. It's a legitimate full-power vacuum (nearly, more about that later) that you can have sitting around and use impulsively with absolutely no hassle. Great if you're a pet owner. I've used this thing at least once every day for the past month and a half and am still smiling when I reach for it. I've had a few battery powered "upright" vacuums and they've all sucked, but this one REALLY sucks. Stupid vacuum puns aside, it makes things clean. The right edge gets right up to the sides of walls and gets everything removed, and the left edge gets pretty close too. It's light, it's simple to use (and admittedly kinda fun) and the swivel-steer works very well for smaller rooms or houses. The lower carrying handle is great for toting it up and down the stairs, so you're not stressing out the prone-to-breakage extendable handle. Or you can just wrap your hands around the neck. Either way, a nice touch. It really does have enough battery life to vacuum an entire small house on a single charge (it's still new, we'll see how badly the Li-On battery degrades with time) and the headlight is of some assistance. I could safely compare this to my Oreck XL - they work almost identically well, and this actually has a slightly wider cleaning path since the brushroll is a little longer and goes closer on both edges. Emptying it is easy and quick. Everything snaps together tightly and assuredly. But, since the internet has made nerds with WAY too much time on our hands of us all, there's a pretty long list of not-so-positives. Although emptying the dust bin is easy and quick, it's pretty much required that one also clean or wash the filter every time the bin is filled. I keep another vacuum around for this - a dustbuster. You've got to suck all the dust off the big long foam (not HEPA) filter to keep it sucking at maximum suck-tential. This gets real tedious, REAL quick. Want to wash it? Hope you can go a few days without vacuuming, as the felt lining takes at least a solid day to dry completely. Also, quite a bit of crap ends up on the filter. A vacuum shouldn't rely so heavily on the filter to do the cleaning. Since the bin is not completely cylindrical due to the design, it can't use the "vortex" or whatever everyone's calling it to spin the dirt away from the center - everything ends up at the center and staying there. I'd imagine that over time, enough gunk will seep through to ruin the motor and glob up the gears that run the fan. Speculation based on observation, but I don't think this vacuum will be something I hand down to the kids one day... The SNAP that it make as the handle transitions from "locked" upright, and again to "going underneath furniture mode" is horrendous. Makes me cringe. It sounds VERY cheap and like it is actively breaking. It's not, but it sounds like it. The lukewarm sliding motion of the upper handle as it's moved up and down for storage and use is not any more satisfying. You'd be a fool to use this on stairs with the handle, as the stress will certainly wear everything out much faster. With not even two months of use on mine, the handle has quite a bit of play and wobble already, but it's still perfectly usable. I've found myself removing the handle entirely, grasping the thing by the rear wheels and gliding it across the stairs front to back. Works like a champ. The brushroll, for whatever reason, doesn't have much overlap of bristles. There's two "helixes" per turn, but the left side has overlap and the right side does not. One would be wise to know as much about their vacuum when removing stubborn crap from carpet. Why not make the whole thing have bristle overlap so there aren't "dead zones" in the cleaning path? Oh, that's why. Because you'll see the red ring of death if you use it on fairly high pile or plush carpet. Standard carpet it does just fine, but if you approach the fancy stuff, it just dies in place. Wait a few seconds and it's ready for another go, but there's some stuff the thing just can't do. Not to mention the screach it makes when it encounters such "stuff". Not sure if that's a clutch in there, or if it's actual gears stripping out. I haven't taken it apart (yet) to see how it's all built. I'd love to see a version with more torque. Nothing about the construction of the machine screams quality. It's designed very nicely. It's a pretty vacuum, but it's a bit wimpy. So there you have it. An absolutely usable cleaning machine that has some quirks. I got mine with a $30 off coupon on Amazon, and picked up another open-item on ebay for a lot less. It's my go-to and I donated my Oreck since I bought it. I hope it lasts at least a year. EDIT Here we are, just about 7 months in, and I just had my handle break. It's been through a lot, so I'm not disappointed, but I am annoyed. After a good thorough cleaning, this vacuum has been assigned specifically for vacuuming my bed, and it has to be dragged along the top of the bad quickly, backwards, in order to keep it from sucking in the blanket and seizing the roller. Seems I was a bit too "quick" with it and the handle's VERY cheesy little snapper plastic thingies couldn't take any more wear. I'd love to see them make a model with the exact same engineering, but with respectable components, even if for more money.
