Vacuum cleaner first look video reviews Samsung Flexiclean

The Samsung Flexiclean comes with a couple of unusual features designed to give you the benefits of both a cylinder and an upright in one vacuum cleaner. 

It's available in branches of Currys and Comet priced around £199. Check out our video review to see if it lives up to the hype.

We now have the full results of rigorous lab tests on the Samsung Flexiclean. Find out how it performed in our lab by visiting the Samsung SU8860 Flexiclean review.

Samsung Flexiclean vacuum cleaner

At first glance the Samsung Flexiclean SU88 appears much like any other bagless upright – if a little larger than some.

Closer inspection reveals the handle doubles as a ‘pop-up’ mini turbo brush tool, designed to help you vacuum corners and edges. This detaches from the main body at the touch of a button and is used ‘cylinder’ style, while the vac itself remains stationary.

Many uprights come with a detachable hose for cleaning upholstery and dusting - for example Dyson uprights come with a telescopic wand feature. The difference with the Samsung is that it’s been designed with a ready-to-go floor tool, albeit a small one.

Getting started with the Flexiclean

Assembling the Flexiclean doesn’t take long. It has a large 15-inch floorhead which helps it to cover a large space quickly, and the power controls are neatly placed at handle height with an LED display.

You can choose between three suction levels and an auto-power control mode, which uses a sensor to adjust suction power depending on the amount of dirt it detects.

The floorhead adjusts to suit the surface you’re cleaning - there’s a setting for hard floor and high and low carpets.

The automatic brush roll on the main floor head can be turned off too – this helps protect delicate rugs or hard floors from accidental damage.

Using the Samsung Flexiclean

It’s rather noisy on the highest setting, but our tests often find uprights are noisier than cylinders.

The Flexiclean appears to pick up plenty of dust and dirt when used as an upright. But we’ll have to wait until we’ve fully tested it in our lab to find out just how effective it really is.

It’s quite heavy, which is common for uprights and means it’s not the easiest to carry up and down stairs.

Samsung claims the dust container can hold three litres, which is in line with the average upright's capacity. There’s a quick release function for emptying the container but we needed two hands to free it from the main body.

Flexi-cleaning

Switching between upright and pop-up mode is easy, but the vac doesn’t move along with you in the way a cylinder does.

The mini turbo pop-up tool has a telescopic tube which extends to suit to height of the user. Samsung says the stretchable hose has a reach of 3.5 metres, but it requires a strong tug to stretch out fully.

The mini turbo brush does a reasonable job of vacuuming but isn’t ideal for larger debris as we discovered when a small tissue caused a blockage. To dislodge blockages you need to open the underside of the brush – this is easy, but a bit of an inconvenience.

But the brush is certainly useful for getting under furniture, using on stairs and cleaning in tight corners, which are all jobs that uprights often struggle with.

Flexiclean vacuum cleaner features

There are two accessory nozzles – a crevice tool and dusting brush. One of the great features of this vac is that all its accessories and parts store neatly on board, so you don’t have to worry about carrying extra bits around the house with you as you clean.

Plus the ‘cylinder' style automatic cable rewind means you won’t have to spend time winding the cable up.

Pros: Large floorhead, plenty of settings and features with additional pop-up floor tool

Cons: Heavy, requires strength to manoeuvre, noisy when on full power

Which? has tested more than 100 vacuum cleaners, including the latest models from Samsung, Dyson and Hoover. Find out the best and worst vacs available in our full vacuum cleaners review.