MOVA, a maker of smart home appliances, showed two new cleaning machines to journalists in Singapore ahead of a regional launch, at a preview held in the Changi Experience Studio inside Jewel Changi Airport. The company says the event was its first live product demonstration in Southeast Asia and the first launch of a product anywhere, with sales of both models beginning on 2 March.

The machines are the Z50 Ultra, a robot vacuum, and the X4 Pro, a wet-and-dry vacuum. MOVA says the Z50 Ultra mops with heated water it calls Thermostatic HydroSync, using a roller mop that cleans with running water, suction of 19,000 pascals and a scrubbing force of 18 newtons, plus sensors that identify different kinds of dirt and change how it cleans. The X4 Pro, the company says, is for deeper cleaning.

Who a robot vacuum is for

Cleaning robots sell best in cities where flats are small and the people in them are short of time, which describes much of Singapore and the region's other capitals, and is exactly why the launch was staged here. The pitch is about the household as much as the machine: it assumes hard floors, reliable power, a phone to run the app, and someone able to spend several hundred dollars on a chore. That the preview was staged in a shopping mall attached to an airport is not incidental to the pitch; it is where the brand expects to find that buyer.

That is a narrower audience than the phrase "Southeast Asia" implies. MOVA's specifications are its own, and it published no independent test results. The category has grown mainly among buyers who already owned a vacuum; whether these devices save time or simply move it to another part of the household is the sort of question a product demonstration is designed not to ask.