What’s better about the latest robotic vacuum from iRobot?   I’m Fred Fishkin with technology BootCamp, a report on gadgets and gear.    There are growing numbers of imitators out there, but iRobot continues to innovate with its line up of Roomba robotic vacuums.    The latest is the Roomba 880 and product manager Max Makeev says one of the big features is what the company left out…

“Over the years we’ve benefitted from a common technology across all vacuum cleaners, which is the bristle brush.  And as you can see we’ve completely eliminated that hundred year old technology, because we wanted to solve the problem of hair entanglement.”  So there’s no brush on this at all?  “That’s correct.  Now we’ve eliminated the brush and we have created a system called Aeroforce extractors.  As you can see there are no bristles and so we fundamentally changed the way we agitate, manipulate and extract debris off of floors and out of carpet fibers.”

  The biggest downside is the price.  The Roomba 880 sells for about 700 dollars.     You can find us at BootCamp.com.   I’m Fred Fishkin.