SEE UPDATES AT BOTTOM:I was skeptical when I bought the Roomba. Our vacuum needed to be replaced and I figured I could try this out and return it if I didn't like it. First run performance was astounding. It really cleaned the floor VERY well. Even in the corners. Wasn't too loud either (as other reviews had mentioned). Sure it makes noise, but it's about half as loud as any vacuum I've ever heard.All-in-all, I'm not completely amazed by this device; although it shines in many ways, its shortcomings are starting to get on my nerves. Below is a break-down of the pros and cons I've experienced. Hopefully this will help you make an informed decision:PROS:o - Cleans well.There's no denying it. This vacuum does a great job, especially in corners. If I leave it in a room and press start, when I come back, the floor is super clean and I was able to focus my time and energy on something more important.o - Anti-tangle feature rocks.Got power cords, chargers, or other wires/cables on the floor? Don't worry. The Roomba senses these items and never gets tangled in them. I was worried about this, but the roomba can go pretty much anywhere without causing a problem.o - Scheduler - ISet this thing to start up around 10:45am daily when no one's home. You can schedule one time for each day of the week. I come home and the place is spotless. AWESOME!!!o - Move it where you need it and leave it alone.I originally thought you had to use the roomba in just one place thinking it would have to "learn" the configuration of the room. That's not the case. Just pick the Roomba up and move it to where you need it and hit 'Clean' and walk away. It does all the work. When you come back into that room, it's totally clean. I LOVE this.o - Spot Clean is really niceYou can put the roomba in the middle of a very messy area and hit "spot" and it will do this spiral clean job covering about a 3 foot diameter circle area and cleans it up.o - Remote controlOnce you figure it out (see complaints below), the remote is very very handy. You can get it to clean small jobs right where you want it to.o - Emptying is quick and easyI used to have a dyson and emptying it usually got lots of dust everywhere. The Roomba is much easier to handle and empty. Also, the filters (comes with two) are easy to clean. I usually rinse it off with warm water and let it dry while the other one is in the roomba. I always have a clean filter around. The manufacturer may want me to buy replacements, but this method works very very well for me. I never put a wet or damp filter into the vacuum.o - Doesn't fall down stairs. Totally stops at the edge of the stairs.o - gentle on furnitureThe roomba senses walls and other furniture that comes all the way to the floor (like chest of drawers). It will slow down to a very slow speed when it approaches these items and doesn't nick or damage the furniture. for chair legs, it does bump though. The edge of the device is cushioned though so it's very gentle.o - When it works, it really works well. But it's not perfect. Read cons below.CONS:o - Doesn't always pick up fine fibersWe got one of those over-sized fake spiders for halloween. The darned thing shed these clumps of black microfibers from its hairy legs. The roomba 880 went over these many times and never picked them up. This is when the bristle brush model would have probably done a superior job compared to the silicon rollers. Finally, I used a Shark vacuum (like a dustbuster with a beater bar in it). That got the hairs up.o - Chairs and obstacles extend the cleaning timeNavigating the dining room table and chair legs is an arduous task for the roomba. It WILL clean well in all of these areas, but it can take a VERY long time bumping, turning moving, bumping, turning, moving over and over again often getting "trapped" between the legs of the same chair more than once.o - Owners manual is a jokeI work in the technology field and get paid to figure out how complex systems function. This owners manual gave practically ZERO helpful information. I had to scour the internet to figure out how the virtual wall and virtual lighthouse (failed to) work. Doesn't tell you the best place to position your roomba dock. Doesn't tell you how the lighthouse works. Doesn't tell you how the wall works. Doesn't tell you how the remote control (REALLY) works.o - Remote control is ridiculously confusingYou can use the remote to "wake up the roomba" by pressing the 'clean' button. Then you are supposed to be able to move it to a spot you want it to start cleaning in by using the direction buttons on the remote. However, as soon as your finger leaves one of these buttons, the roomba goes into "dock" mode and starts looking for its home. It took me a while to figure out that you had to press the 'clean' button again to get it to stop looking for the dock, the press it once more to have it start to clean. Really confusing and this is NOT what the manual says it should do.o - Frequently cannot find its dockThis happens probably 50% of the time. I come home and the roomba isn't in its dock. I hunt around and eventually find it sitting in some lonely corner just as dead as a doornail. This is not supposed to happen, especially when the roomba has woken up on its own and starting a cleaning cycle. One would imagine the "intelligent" device would remember where its dock was positioned, but this is not the case. Lovely bonus... we left for Thanksgiving vacation and I set the scheduler and left. Came home and the roomba was in the living room dead. The memory had been lost for the time of day and day of the week, which I had to reset. The schedule stayed in memory, but the clock... nope. The kitchen wasn't ever cleaned so I came home to a dirty house. Something that a $700 vacuum should do, no??o - Needs to be emptied frequently.At least daily. If not, more. We moved into a place with some new carpet. If you've ever gotten new carpet, you'll know that it sheds a lot of fiber in the first few months of ownership. Due to this factor, the Roomba would fill up its dirt bay within about 5 minutes of running. Now, it's a little better. This is purely a function of the carpet and with older carpets, it doesn't have this problem.o - "Algorithm" ain't all that smartI thought this robot would "learn" the lay of the land and get the floor cleaned in the most efficient manner possible. This couldn't be further from the truth. As we all know, every room has... you know... furniture. If you had a completely empty rectangular room, the Roomba would clean it pretty systematically, I'm sure. But once it bumps into a table leg or lamp base or whatever, it just goes off in a new direction. I've personally witnessed the Roomba spend over an hour and a half (not exaggerating) in a 16x16 square foot room seemingly going over the same areas several times.o - Virtual Lighthouse is uselessThe virtual lighthouse is a black device that's about the size of your fist that is supposed to cast an infra-red beam across a doorway separating two rooms and act as a temporary barrier between these rooms. The idea is that only when the roomba is done cleaning the first room, it will cross the barrier and start to clean the other room. This model comes with 2 of these devices, but I've never seen the roomba successfully clean three rooms. Partly because it gets full too fast, and partly because once it crosses that first barrier, it doesn't really know the difference between the first and the second. Eventually, it just thinks it's completely done and goes into 'dock' mode. But in these cases, it won't cross back over the invisible barrier to get to the room where its dock is. One usually ends up turning the roomba off manually, or it just shuts itself off.o - Virtual wall is okay, but if the Roomba was a little smarter, you wouldn't even need it. The virtual wall is the same device as the lighthouse. You just flip a switch on it to become a wall. This is just like the lighthouse only the barrier becomes "permanent". If you didn't have this, the roomba would take hours to clean one floor as it randomly bounced around trying to get every inch of the floor by running as long as it could. If it were smarter and actually "learned" how the room is configured, it should be able to do a good job without the need for this device.================SUMMARYIn closing, I will say that I'm not planning on returning this vacuum. I know I have some complaints above, but overall, I have to admit, the pros really do outweigh the cons in my book. My house is cleaner than it's been in years because the floor is getting thoroughly vacuumed every day. All the bells and whistles aren't there yet, but this vacuum really does add value for me and my family. My wife and I used to spend quite a bit of time sweeping the messy floor every night after our 3 and 5-year old finished dinner and lunch. The roomba has given us back a lot of this time, which we both value greatly.UPDATE: Damaged furniture===================A year after purchasing the roomba, it's performance has been lackluster. I often come home and the roomba is dead in a corner having gotten tangled up in a power cord from our lamp or a charger. This is something this model is supposed to know how to avoid.The Roomba bangs into the wooden legs of our couch and leather comfy chairs, gouging the wood. Had to apply a strip of padding to the front end, but this eventually was worn away after repeated collisions.As it has aged, it doesn't pick up as much either. Sometimes it "finishes" cleaning our living room and there are still things on the floor that haven't gotten cleaned up.