Peter Griffin: Everyone needs this little sucker

He came into my house, nosed around some, collected bits and pieces that didn't belong to him, and left. I'm grateful to him. Every house should have a robotic vacuum cleaner and the way they're coming down in price, most households soon will.

The Roomba from iRobot has been on the market here for some time but I've always been sceptical. Robots - as I mentioned in a previous column about Sony's idiotic robotic dog - aren't very good at doing anything useful in the domestic setting.

This ground-grubbing sucker may be the exception. It seems to have as much sucking power as a good conventional vacuum cleaner despite being battery powered and using a filter instead of a bag.

And it's not complicated to control. Roomba has pre-programmed settings and uses sensors to get around the house. It'll nudge a wall, register it's there and follow the skirting board. It knows when a staircase looms and how to avoid crashing down it. When low on juice it'll go back to the cradle to recharge.

Watching Roomba you get the impression it's incredibly indecisive, going in one direction and moving off to clean another spot. But there's method in its madness. I set a test for Roomba: I threw flour all over the floor of a mid-sized room, put Roomba in it and left it shut up for an hour. When I came back all the flour was gone and Roomba was sitting there quietly.

The robot's cleaning patternis systematic - once it knowsthe boundaries to work within, Roomba will clean the entire surface, as long as there is nothing to obstruct it.

Roomba comes with two devices to set up a laser field to mark parts of the house as off-limits. It creates an invisible wall which the robot will nudge, which causes it to turn around and find another patch to clean. It's very useful for areas with lots of cables or tassled rugs.

For conventional, carpeted households, Roomba is perfect. It's less suitable for cluttered open-plan living spaces. The Roomba is also incredibly noisy so you'll want it to work when you're out. The only problem is the little fella may set off some house alarms.

But Roomba, which uses the technology first used to build bomb-disarming robots, has come far enough to be a perfectly adequate replacement to the vacuum cleaner for many households.

In the future you will be able to buy a scheduler to programme Roomba's cleaning schedule.

Price: $699

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Thanks to those who emailed me in response to last week's column where I suggested that Telecom and Vodafone were asking too much in charging $3.50 a song downloaded to a mobile phone.

Most of you said you'd be comfortable paying $1-$2 a song. Hip hop producer John Manuel sees a golden opportunity for independent musicians to reach a large audience through mobile downloads.

"There's no need for a distribution deal - you can just create a file and sell as many downloads as you want," he says. "No buying CDs, no printing CD [booklets], and people have the choice of buying the songs they like."