Beatbot Sora 70 Review: A Fast Robotic Pool Cleaner That Actually Skims the Surface

Introduction

Robotic pool cleaners have a familiar shortcoming: most of them only handle the bottom. The Beatbot Sora 70 tries to break that pattern by adding genuine surface cleaning, alongside fast track-based movement and a generous four-hour battery life. After spending time with it in a real, leaf-battered Florida pool, the picture is clear: the cleaning performance is genuinely impressive, while the app experience is the weak link.

This review walks through what you get in the box, how setup goes, how the Sora 70 actually cleans, and what you should know before buying.

Who This Product Is For

The Sora 70 makes the most sense for pool owners with open, unscreened pools, especially around trees that drop leaves constantly. Surface cleaning is the standout feature here: most robots in the sub-$750 range only clean the bottom and edges, leaving you to skim leaves by hand. The Sora 70 handles that job for you.

It is also a good fit if you run a cleaner daily. Four hours of battery life is enough that this robot could plausibly clean an entire average pool in around an hour and a half or less, given how quickly it moves.

What’s in the Box

The package includes a quick start guide, a full user manual, a retrieval hook, and a standard charging brick. The quick start guide covers the structure of the device, charging, app setup via QR code, powering on, starting a clean, and how to retrieve the robot. That last point matters: the supplied hook is a backup, not the primary retrieval method. The Sora 70 is designed to surface like a submarine and glide right up to the pool side where you can grab it easily. Anyone who has had a robot die in the deepest part of the pool will appreciate that.

Two build details stand out. The unit weighs only around 20-something pounds, which is light for this category. And the charging ports use titanium to resist corrosion, a sensible touch for something that lives in and around pool water.

Getting It Set Up and in the Water

Charging is simple: press the charging brick onto the port and a charge indicator confirms the connection. Once charged, the robot fills its buoyancy chamber and sinks, which the manufacturer says takes about five minutes.

The app is where things get rough. On first setup, two errors appeared almost immediately. The cause turned out to be the app trying to auto-connect to the robot’s Wi-Fi, which does not work reliably. The fix is to open your phone’s Wi-Fi settings manually and join the Sora 70’s network directly. That solved everything.

Firmware updating had a hiccup too: the install stalled at the “installing” stage for roughly ten minutes until the app was closed and reopened, at which point it was complete. Not a dealbreaker, but annoying.

Cleaning Performance

This is where the Sora 70 shines. It is the fastest robotic pool cleaner tested to date, moving across the pool floor at a pace that visibly clears leaves within minutes. It takes slightly longer to pivot around corners, which is normal, but the overall speed is exceptional.

Surface mode is the headline feature. Activated within Pro mode, the robot rises to the waterline and collects floating leaves, exactly the chore this robot is meant to eliminate. The large debris bin held an impressive load, and a pool that had filled with leaves came out spotless.

The robot is also smart about obstacles. When it encounters a spot where it could get stuck, it tries for about twenty seconds, reverses out, and keeps working. In practice, it almost does not need the app at all.

One design frustration: you cannot switch between floor cleaning and surface mode on the fly. Changing modes requires stopping the robot, pulling it out, letting it drain, and putting it back in. Be careful when stopping it too, because if you lose connection the robot simply sinks to the bottom and you will be fishing it out with the hook.

Things to Consider Before Buying

The app is the weakest point. Beyond the initial Wi-Fi pairing issue and the stalled firmware update, there is an unresolved question about whether the robot expects to stay connected to Wi-Fi while in the pool, which is a tricky ask underwater. If the software side simply disappeared in favor of a physical start button, the experience would arguably be better.

Also worth knowing: pause does not automatically make the robot surface. It just sits at the bottom, so the retrieval hook is worth keeping close. If your pool is screened in, you may not need surface mode as often, which reduces the appeal of the headline feature.

Buying Advice

If you want a robotic cleaner that genuinely replaces daily skimming, the Sora 70 is easy to recommend. The combination of surface cleaning, floor speed, four-hour battery life, light weight, and corrosion-resistant titanium charging ports delivers where it counts.

Go in with realistic expectations about the app: connect to the robot’s Wi-Fi manually from your phone’s settings, close and reopen the app if a firmware update stalls, and plan mode changes around pulls from the pool rather than expecting on-the-fly switching. Once those quirks are known, the robot itself does its job superbly.

Conclusion

The Beatbot Sora 70 is a fast, capable robotic pool cleaner whose surface-skimming ability sets it apart from most competitors in its price range. The cleaning hardware is excellent. The companion app is the one part that needs refinement. If surface cleaning matters to you, this robot is one of the strongest options around.