MOVA. Who Are They?
We have just tried the MOVA S70 Roller. If you haven’t heard of MOVA yet, you’re not alone. MOVA only landed in Australia in 2025, and it’s not some fly-by-night gadget brand elbowing its way in at CES (that’s the enormous tech conference in Las Vegas where every company promises the future). MOVA is the newer, sharper sibling of Dreame, the Chinese robotics giant that’s spent years quietly out-engineering the Roombas of the world. Dreame runs the flagship line, MOVA is its value-focused offshoot, built on the same engineering DNA but priced to win a different customer.
Think of Dreame as Qantas, the seasoned parent carrier, and MOVA as the newer regional airline flying the same routes at a friendlier fare. It’s not quite Jetstar though. MOVA still wants the upmarket seat, just at a Jetstar price. The range is already massive, running from robot vacuums through to a robotic pool cleaner (the Diver A10) and even a robotic window cleaner (the N1). Its flagship, the V70 Ultra Complete, just picked up a 2026 Red Dot Award for Product Design, so this is a brand making real noise in the deep end of the Australian smart home market. We missed the Sydney showcase, more’s the pity, but the S70 Roller landed on our doorstep soon after.
The Arrival
The box lands at my door, roughly the size of a small esky. Everything connects into tidy sections: the All-in-One Base Station arrives with its clean and dirty water tanks separate (clean on the right, dirty on the left), and the ramp clicks easily into the base. The robot itself, all 350mm x 350mm x 90mm of it, has a filter and bin that clicks into place, and there’s an accessories and spare parts pack with mop pads, rollers, a multi-surface floor cleaner and spare brushes. Oh, and a user manual, obviously. I always challenge myself on how much I can get running before I have to open it. This time, not quite all the way.
The Set Up
I know setting up a robot is supposed to be easy, but it’s always such a faff. First, I press and hold the power button for three seconds, and the robot chimes to life with a little tune (not quite a Delta Goodrem song, but it’s trying). I sit it on the base to charge. Then it’s the now-familiar ritual: scan the QR code, download the app, sign up with an email and a new password, add a mobile number, scan the robot’s own QR code, connect to wifi (which means remembering the wifi password, never a highlight), and finally, mapping. All up, about fifteen minutes, and it’s roaming my house. I never quite get used to the first few hours with a new robot. It feels like bringing home a new date who starts nosing around your house and quietly judging every room and me!
The App
Every robot vacuum app is a little different, but MOVA clearly benefits from Dreame’s years of interface polish. It’s easy to use. I can map each area, name the rooms, even drop in furniture and label that too. I set no-go zones around our greyhounds’ beds so the S70 won’t harass them (though they’re more often snoozing on the sofa than in their actual beds). The app saves multiple floor maps, which suits us fine across three levels: ground floor, our main living level, and the bedroom floor upstairs. From one screen I can adjust suction power, mop wetness, mop washing frequency and even its cleaning routes. The dock settings are genuinely useful too. I’ve owned robots that scurry back to the dock to recharge after ten minutes of cleaning and then dawdle. Here, I can tell it to get out there and not come home until the job’s done.
The Features
Considering what you would have got a few years ago. Bots have come a long way. For the price, this is a genuinely competitive spec. The S70 Roller I’m testing runs 28,000Pa of suction, paired with 4700Pa of downward pressure through its roller mop, both straight from MOVA’s own spec sheet. That suction sits in the mid tier for 2026’s robot vacuums. MOVA’s own flagship, the V70 Ultra Complete, more than doubles it at 42,000Pa, for a lot more money ($3,299 versus this unit’s $1,999).
The roller mop itself is 27cm wide and extends a further 4.4cm via MOVA’s MaxiReach tech, with the side brush extending out to match, so it sweeps closer to skirting boards and cabinet edges than a round brush ever could. HydroForce keeps the roller mop hydrated through eight separate points along its length, so you’re mopping with clean water rather than smearing dirty water in slow motion. I think for mopping it does a really good job and emptying the dirty water tank confirms it, weirdly gross, but weirdly satisfying.
It trundles under my cabinets and along the skirting boards just fine, and generally handles my floor-mounted aircon grates OK, though it does get stuck on the vent in my lounge room floor (as basically every robot I’ve tested does). At 90mm tall, it won’t fit under our King Furniture sofa either, so that patch of floor is still a broom job.
The biggest drawback is that the S70 Roller does not climb. There’s no leg-lifting system, so door tracks and rug edges over about a centimetre or two do occasionally trip it up (ours does a sad little reversing shuffle at our thicker rug edges, though it glides over the thinner ones without complaint). If you want MOVA’s clever StepMaster System 2.0, the motorised legs that lift the chassis over thresholds up to 9cm, you’ll need to step up to the V70 Ultra Complete instead.
MOVA doesn’t publish an exact object-recognition number for the base S70 Roller (its pricier siblings claim 280-plus and 300-plus object types respectively), but in practice it does a reasonable job navigating phone charger cables, wine glasses left on the floor and what I can only describe as an alarming quantity of fluffy dog toys. Maggie the greyhound is, as far as I can tell, not one of the recognised objects. She and her sister remain entirely unconvinced this thing isn’t a creature from another planet.
The Clean and The Dock
It cleans well, with very few smears, and lifts a dried coffee stain near my kitchen island within a couple of runs. The extending mop and brush are a game changer for corner and edge coverage. On its first pass around my kitchen bench, it missed a few corners; by the second pass, they were gone.
It doesn’t run the kind of AI camera vision system you’ll find on pricier flagships, so it’s noticeably less confident navigating trickier surfaces. Our darker bath mats confuse it occasionally (common in bots that read a dark surface as a step down or a void), and the odd dog toy gets nudged rather than avoided.
The dock is clearly where MOVA’s engineers had the most fun. It washes the roller mop in hot water (up to 80°C, per MOVA’s spec sheet) and dries it with hot air up to 70°C, then tops itself back up from a 5-litre clean water tank and a 4.5-litre waste tank. I have had it for over six weeks and It’s genuinely hands-off for weeks at a time.
The trade-off is no bagless system, unlike the pricier V70 Ultra Complete. The base station empties the robot’s onboard bin into a 3.2-litre dust bag inside the dock. MOVA doesn’t publish exactly how many weeks that lasts, and realistically it depends entirely on what’s shedding in your house. Our two greyhounds are light shedders, so ours has plenty of runway; if you’ve got a Golden Retriever then, budget for buying replacement bags (sold in three-packs through MOVA’s Australian store) more often than you’d like.
For longer hair it struggles a bit and I notice that long threads get a little stuck around the edges of the cleaning roller – it clicks out and is easy to clean, but it’s worth thinking about if you have anyone with long hair in the home.
The Verdict
What Are We Addicted To?
The MaxiReach mop and side brush extension. The roller mop is fast becoming the default best-in-class mopping system, and watching that little arm swing out with its own spinning brush, pushing debris into the main mop, never gets old. It’s a middle of the range robot. At this price point, it’s excellent value. We’ve also had the Ecovacs Deebot T90 Pro Omni through the Daily Addict test lab (house), the T90 edges the S70 on navigation smarts and outright cleaning finesse. But the S70 Roller isn’t trying to be the flashiest robot in the room. It’s the reliable all-rounder.
What Do We Need To Be More Addicted?
The navigation isn’t quite up there with pricier bots, it can’t climb a single step let alone a threshold, and it lacks the raw suction and downward pressure of the models above it in MOVA’s own range. It doesn’t have bagless cleaning. All of that is relative though, and every one of those trade-offs is exactly what you’d expect to give up at this price.
$1,999 RRP. Available at Harvey Norman, JB HI-FI, The Good Guys, Amazon and via the MOVA Australia website.