Samsung Jet 90 Pro (Powerstick Jet VS9000) review

If you watch the promo for the Powerstick Jet (Jet 90), you’ll get a good sense of how Samsung wants you to perceive its product. It’s serious. It’s powerful. It looks like a weapon that would slot into Robocop’s arm. 

The Jet is compatible with Samsung’s Clean Station, a vacuum bin that protects the user from dust when emptying their cleaner. To find out more about it, you can read our review. 

If you’d like to see how the Jet stacks up against other vacs on the market, have a look at our round-up of the best vacuum cleaners we’ve tested.

Design & build

There’s a lot to the Powerstick Jet (Jet 90 Pro). It arrives in a huge box crammed with accessories and attachments. At first, it’s quite hard to see how it all fits together until you spot the QR code on the charging base. Scan it and you’ll get instructions on how to set it up.

The first step is to put together the charging stand. Once you’ve laid out all the pieces, it’s easy to do. All you’ll need is a Phillips-head screwdriver to tighten a single screw.

The freestanding charging stand – called the Z Station – is where you’ll both store and charge your vacuum cleaner and it’s a key part of its design.  

The advantage of this set-up is that you have a dedicated spot for your vacuum cleaner and accessories, as there’s space to clip on all the extras. Or almost all. Annoyingly, if you get the Jet Pro with spinning sweeper, there aren’t enough slots on the Z Station to attach all of the accessories. Even if one of the attachment heads remains on the cleaner, there’s still another one knocking around.

A great feature is the dock on the stand for a second battery to charge. The Jet only comes with one, but a spare battery can be purchased separately. You can swap out the one you’re using for the one charging, and extend your cleaning time by up to an hour before you need to stop and recharge. It makes this cordless a real contender for people with larger homes. 

The disadvantage of the stand is that it’s heavy, immobile and needs to be situated near a power point. That means that it’s not much good to you in a cupboard.  

If you take a look at the product photography on Samsung’s site, it’s clear that they’re suggesting that the Jet is not the kind of vacuum cleaner you want to hide in storage anyway. The pictures are reminiscent of the Peleton campaign, giving the impression that were you to visit the minimalist, marble-floored lounge of your average billionaire, you’d find only a massive, cream leather sofa and an exercise bike or vacuum cleaner, coolly outlined against the backdrop of an infinity pool.

Those of us without an LA mansion to properly display our Jets, those of us with – oh, I don’t know – a small London flat, for example, might be at a bit of a loss as to what to do with it. It’s large. It’s eye-catching. The fully-loaded Z Station looks like a sci-fi gun rack from which you might create the kind of modular weapon that could liquefy a man’s head from ten miles away.

Ideally, you want a utility room in which to store it and presumably, if you have a home that could get the most out of a mighty vacuum cleaner like this, you may well have one. The space issue is really our only reservation with this cleaner. 

Features & performance

At 2.8kg, the Jet is a very light vacuum cleaner. It’s lighter than a Dyson V11 stick (2.97kg) and comes very close to the weight of the brilliant little Halo Capsule (2.6 kilos). 

It’s very comfortable to use, especially in conjunction with another nice feature. It has a telescopic column with four different settings, so you can adjust it – exactly – to your ideal vacuuming height. This makes a real difference to cleaning, as you never have to stoop or bend.

There are two roller brush head attachments: the turbo action brush and a mini-motorised tool. The first of these works well on both hard flooring and carpets. The mini tool is good for sofas, beds and car seats. There’s another small brush head attachment and an extendable crevice tool that can get into difficult spots.

Then, if you’ve opted for the Pro, rather than the Pet model, there’s the excellent spinning sweeper. This a hard floor attachment with two rotating discs covered in microfibre mop pads, which can be dampened or swapped out for disposable cloths. You’ll need to vacuum first as usual (you can’t vac and mop at once – that would be madness), then you can change the attachment to mop your floor.

This is the first vacuum cleaner mop attachment that we can say really works. It’s actually better than regular mopping. It’s fast and very effective and you can exert enough pressure to get a floor really clean. Is this accessory worth the £50 that drives the price of the Jet from £549 (for the Pet edition) to £599 (for the Pro)? Surprisingly, we would have to say that it is.

Our favourite feature, however, is the jointed attachment that allows you to create a 90-degree angle between the handle and cleaning head so you can vacuum the tops of bookcases and shelves overhead.

The dust container and filter represent another great bit of design. They can be completely taken apart, dropped into the sink and properly washed. As the collection bin is transparent, this is a great feature not only for cleanliness and vacuum performance but for aesthetics.

The Jet also has a HEPA filter that promises 99.99% dust removal. Bear in mind that this is compromised by the fact that it’s bagless, so when you come to dispose of the dust, some of it will inevitably escape. You can get around this if you purchase the compatible Clean Station for £199. It’s a suction bin that the Jet fits into. The bag in the Clean Station only needs emptying every month or two, depending on your frequency of use.

This is all only slightly let down by the fact that the dust collection capacity is pretty low at only 0.5 litres.

The display panel is straightforward and easy to read, with three main settings: Min, Mid and Max, as well as Wet, the mopping setting. There’s an on/off button and + and – keys to adjust the power. All of the buttons are easy to reach while you’re using the machine and the battery has an LED display to show how much charge remains.

At the minimum power setting, you’ll get about an hour of vacuuming time. And minimum is powerful enough for this to be your standard vacuum setting. It’s pretty quiet, as well.

In terms of battery life, you should always consider how the power setting affects battery life. If a cleaner promises an hour, that will be the maximum amount of time you can possibly get from the battery, and it’s always measured on the lowest setting. If you use the medium setting, you can knock that down to under half an hour at best. At the top setting, you won’t get close to ten minutes. But with a decent quality vacuum cleaner, you should really only need to use the highest setting for a few emergency spot cleans.

Price & availability

The Powerstick Jet ( Jet 90 Pet edition) retails for £549. The version we tested, the Jet 90 Pro, which also features the spinning sweeper, is £599. This is clearly a lot of money to shell out for a vacuum cleaner. However, it’s about the same price as the Dyson V11 and the Jet improves on all of its specs: it’s lighter, more powerful and has a faster charging time. It also comes with some really well designed and useful attachments.

It’s available from Samsung UK, Amazon UK and other electrical retailers.

Verdict

There is a lot of kit with the Jet, particularly if you opt for the version with the spinning sweeper attachment. The extendable main column and jointed attachment are particularly great accessories that make cleaning much more comfortable and easy. Then there’s the spinning mop attachment, which is an unexpected success.

There are only two real issues with it. The first is its storage requirements. Its stand needs a decent chunk of space in close proximity to a plug point. The second is its small dust bin, which could get annoying to empty if you have a large home.

All in all, this is the ultimate all-rounder: flexible, lightweight, powerful and with great battery life.

If you have a dust sensitivity and want to turn the bagless Jet into a dust-free, bagged cleaner, read our review of the compatible Samsung Clean Station.