The Dyson Omni-glide vacuum is hailed as the brand's slimmest, most maneuverable, and best cordless vacuum yet, with a design to make cleaning those hard-to-reach spaces easier. I put it to work in a series of tests to see if it was worth a top spot in our round-up of the best vacuum cleaners and, ultimately, whether it's worth your cash.
The Dyson Omni-glide, set to be released in July 2021 for $399.99, has been engineered to make your everyday vacuuming route a breeze, thanks to the omnidirectional soft roller cleaner head. This means, in simple terms, that it can be pushed in any direction, including sideways, while still delivering an ultra-powerful clean. It should also be able to make its way around obstacles with no trouble as it rolls in your hands to find an alternative cleaning path.
The Dyson Omni-glide is a compact, cordless model that has been created with city living in mind, enabling vacuuming to be a painless, efficient everyday task. Let's see how it performed in a series of tests to assess just how convenient it is.
Dyson Omni-glide: Key specs
- Cleaning time: 20 minutes
- Dustbin capacity: 0.05 gallons
- Type: Cordless
- Battery charge time: 210 minutes (3.5 hours)
- Suitable for: Hardwood floors
Dyson Omni-glide: Design
The Dyson Omni-glide is claimed by the manufacturer to be the “most maneuverable vacuum for hardwood floors”, and even from a cursory glance, it’s clear to see that this vacuum is easy to navigate. It is a super slim, lightweight cordless stick vacuum, which uses two simple power buttons, rather than a trigger mechanism, for operation. You only need to hold on to the upper part of the stick, meaning you can switch hands in a flash to get it to glide around different corners of your room.
Aside from the stick design, the star component of the Dyson Omni-glide vacuum is the omnidirectional soft roller ‘Fluffy’ cleaner head. Measuring eight inches wide and with two motorized soft rollers that spin in synchronicity, the Fluffy head can move effortlessly forwards, backward, and even sideways. That’s thanks to the design of the articulating neck of the model, which has four stabilizing castors to allow it to shimmy along in any direction you need it to.
Parts of your home that are more of a tight squeeze, such as awkward crevices between furniture, will be no match for the design of the Dyson Omni-glide. The soft roller cleaner head itself is small but mighty powerful, and you can simply twist your vacuum’s stick to a 90-degree angle to get any tight spots vacuumed to perfection.
This model is also made so useful thanks to its in-line format. That means it has been streamlined to the finest degree so that you can lie it flat without losing suction - ideal for reaching under sofas and furniture with ease. It will spin up to 105,000 rpm even when it’s laid horizontally, with claims that it can capture 99.7% of particles as small as 0.3 microns.
When it comes to battery life, the Dyson Omni-glide can run for up to 20 minutes, with a light on the top of the stick flashing to indicate when it is fully charged and when it needs to be returned to the wall-mounted charger for a boost. You can switch up to Max mode any time you want a little more power to work with, such as vacuuming any especially stubborn debris. A run time of 20 minutes is justifiable given this model’s appeal to city-living customers; it’s a timescale that allows you to clean around an apartment for everyday spruce-ups rather than tackle an entire house.
Ultimately, this model is best suited to hardwood floors, as its mobility powers will be less useful on carpets. While I found it still achieved an unbelievable clean on carpets, picking up a magnitude of dust and debris, you’ll only experience the full maneuverability of this model when applied to harder surfaces. If you need a model that’s suitable for all floor types or inhabits a larger house that you think might require heavier-duty cleaning, then check out our Dyson V15 Detect review. It’s a brand-new model that can run for up to an hour and has innovative features to help you eradicate dust in your home.
Dyson Omni-glide: Performance
There’s a wealth of engineering behind Dyson vacuums, from the numerous cyclones inside to the easy-eject bin. But does the Dyson Omni-glide live up to estimations? I found, despite its smaller size, that this was a vacuum to be contended with, with an impressive performance in a series of tests.
I tested the Dyson Omni-glide on a hard floor in order to get a feel for its maneuverability and were impressed by the offset. Though it’s extremely light to carry, as soon as you press the power button, you can feel the power flooding through the stick and vibrating in your hands. Whether this is a gimmick or not, it certainly makes you feel like you have a powerful tool to vacuum with.
It’s unbelievably easy to push the Omni-glide around, and the lack of fiddling with buttons means you can switch hands with no fuss. It doesn’t get tiring to handle this vacuum at all for the full 20 minutes, and the Fluffy cleaner head leads with little force needing to be exerted at all. The motorized bars within the head spin at the exact same time, vacuuming any mess at the front and back of your cleaning path. These excellent mobility features mean this vacuum would be suitable for anyone with dexterity issues to push around their home.
It’s a testament to the Dyson Omni-glide’s suction abilities that the bin cup fills up seriously fast as you vacuum. Clearly, the suction power is excellent, but it does mean you need to empty it out. Thankfully, the ejection mechanism on this vacuum means you can just point it at your bin and pull the lever, and the debris will fall away without you having to get your hands dirty. I didn’t even mind the extra trips to the bin, thanks to the efficiency of the ejector, as your bin is clean again in under a minute.
In my tests, I used flour and crushed oats to measure just how adeptly the Dyson Omni-glide could suck up both larger debris and fine dust. On both occasions, I found that one glide with the vacuum could clean up all of the mess in its path without ever needing to up the level to the Max mode. The battery of the Dyson Omni-glide will deteriorate faster in Max mode, so it’s good to know that Auto will do the job efficiently. The Omni-glide was capable of dealing with the fine texture of flour as it was with the larger oats, with the two roller heads scooping them up in no time at all.
My noise tests measured the sound of the Omni-glide to an average of 71 decibels on the Auto setting, which was bumped up to around 75 when I went to ‘Max’ mode. This is usual for vacuum cleaners from the brand, and the noise isn’t too affecting at all, with the noise being comparable to a radio playing.
The capabilities of the Dyson Omni-glide are extended with the addition of three interchangeable heads included with your purchase. One swift change out of the Fluffy head means this model is then entirely handheld, allowing you to get up high or onto furniture for a deeper clean. You can clean into awkward spots with the two-in-one dusting and crevice tool, sort out your sofas with the fabric cleaner, and get larger pieces of debris with the worktop tool. I used the worktop tool to clean away debris left after testing, and it works nicely, showing that the Omni-glide would be handy for multiple rooms.
At $399.99, you might be surprised to find that this, in fact, is one of the cheapest cordless stick vacuums available from Dyson. This is probably due to the smaller bin, design, and shorter run time, which is where similar models get extremely expensive. Still, it’s entirely understandable if you don’t feel that you can stretch to a vacuum just shy of $400. You might want to alternatively check out our Shark Navigator Lift-Away vacuum review for a corded appliance that’s a little more affordable.
Should you buy the Dyson Omni-glide vacuum?
The Dyson Omni-glide delivers on all of the promises it makes, from the ability to sweep into tight spaces to incredibly impressive suction power. Plus, it’s so easy to use that vacuuming hardly feels like a chore, with technology that you can see working as you move around. There are drawbacks to its features, including the short run time and small bin, but it can’t be forgotten that this a vacuum designed for quick, everyday use in apartments, rather than large spaces, and these features are actually handy in light of that.
Aside from its lack of suitability on hardwood floors, the other drawback of the Dyson Omni-glide is its price. Though $399.99 is much more reasonable than similar Dyson models, it is still a lot of money to spend. Overall, however, I think that the Omni-glide is worth the hype and the price.
