Oral-B iO Series 9 Toothbrush Review
‘Our best electric toothbrush yet’ is the opening line from Oral-B for their shiny and all new iO Series 9 toothbrush. With a rethinking of the toothbrush head design, 3D teeth tracking using artificial intelligence and a companion App to run on your smartphone, it should by all accounts be referred to as a ‘smart brush’; well that is if it's deserving of such an accolade.
Design
This toothbrush has departed from the sterile mould, as Braun have created something that actually looks stylish whilst also being ergonomic. No more rubberised grip on the handle that will stain blue from toothpaste over time, or silicone bits which clog up. This toothbrush is, and it means to go on, clean. A satin finish, available in black onyx, alabaster white and rose quartz colours, offers superb grip even with the icky concoction of toothpaste and water to compete with. It rinses off and dries easily too.
Good ideas from previous brushes remain in place, such as the multicoloured LED ring to indicate when you’re brushing too hard (red), too soft (white) and when the correct amount of pressure is applied (green). Force feedback is also here, but sometimes when you’re tired it can be easy to miss when you’ve brushed for a 30 second block and to second guess if you’ve brushed the full 2 minute cycle. New is the display: having an easy to read colour screen visible in the mirror, makes seeing realtime timer progress at a glance blissfully simple. The additional benefit of selecting a mode and visual feedback via animated faces is a nice touch, so you get a smiley face when you’ve brushed well for example. But one of our favourite utilities of this display has to be the battery percentage readout; it makes a world of difference to reliably know the amount of energy left. Once it hits 0%, the brush turns into a manual type, no low power mode, so we never let it go below 10%.
Charging, Battery & Modes
In the box you’ll also find the premium Power2Go travel case, which you can charge the toothbrush within, travel brush head holder (ideal for couples) and the magnetic charger base. The later accessory is a nice redesign of the previous generation of Oral-B chargers where the toothbrush had to be aligned in a certain way to connect onto the base. Now you can pop it down at any angle and it's fully charged within 3hrs. However, the magnetism could be a tad stronger as a slight knock will destabilise the brush. Ours is located on a shelf, so the brush has successfully fended off some falls onto the carpet - nevertheless a testament to the design.
Battery life lasts consistently for fourteen two minute cleaning cycles, so you have a solid week of cleaning in daily clean mode. There are 7 modes in total, which include a sensitive mode for a gentler clean, super sensitive, whiten, gum care for massaging, intense and tongue clean.
The New Brush Head
Weirdly this brush is only supplied with a lonely toothbrush head, a departure from the days when Oral-B would bundle four with their top of the line model. With that previous top of the line model, the GENIUS 9000 Toothbrush, you had a wide selection of different styles of compatible toothbrush heads to choose from. Whereas the new iO Series offers the solitary choice of the iO Ultimate Clean round brush head (a gentle version with exactly the same design also offered). If you’re used to using the Oral-B Ultra White brush head, then the iO Ultimate Clean will seem like a familiar friend, but if you’re not a fan of round brush heads, this most likely isn’t going to be a toothbrush of interest.
Cleaning and AI Teeth Tracking
There is no doubt that brushing with this toothbrush is definitely in noticeable contrast from any previous Oral-B toothbrush we’ve used. The brush head is the reason for this as it has been designed in tandem with the electric drive mechanism itself to be a unified solution. Whilst the round iO Ultimate Clean brush head is not noticeably altered in dimension to other Oral-B round heads, it feels larger in the mouth and also provides the sensation as if its coverage over teeth is broader due to the linear magnetic drive system that the Oral-B iO Series 9 utilises. Something about the way the vibrational energy is supposed to power individual bristles, rewards with a pleasantly different style of cleaning that feels more sensitive but counterintuitively is more competent at cleaning.
Instead of contributing your own hand movement to the brush's algorithmic cleaning method, you can feel that the brush itself is doing all the work and you’re just gliding it along. The brush head has no issue being flexible enough to glide into the extremities of teeth, irregular molars, gaps, and is particularly pleasant to use over gums in that mode. After three weeks of usage, the brush head is like new and all plaque is removed from teeth. We’re pitting this against the GENIUS 9000 which already taught us how not to brush with too much pressure and, whilst the same lessons are still applicable, we are already not guilty of that. Nevertheless, we are pleased that this is an obvious upgrade from the fondly received GENIUS 9000 in the cleaning department. Even when comparing every head used with that previous toothbrush design, the Oral-B iO Series 9 with iO Ultimate Clean brush head is definitely ahead, and has the added pleasure of an overall nicer user experience.
However, whilst the toothbrush can clean as well as it does, it’s all for nothing if your coverage is terrible. This is where the app comes into play; sensors within the toothbrush communicate with your smartphone to utilise artificial intelligence that will learn and improve your cleaning coverage. Accuracy is able to be monitored in real time on your smartphone display and it’s just about perfect, with the exception of an occasional mild lag here and there. We found that we were within the range of 91% coverage, but that still leaves area for improvement and Oral-B are letting us know. After brushing, it breaks down a detailed diagram of your teeth to clearly show those areas that need more focus and coach you to improve the areas routinely under served. Compared to the previous Oral-B design, which required a smartphone to be suction-cupped to a mirror to track this with the camera, we can safely say we like this a whole lot more. If the smartphone wasn’t required to be alongside to track and only synced back to view after brushing, it would be even better, but as the Bluetooth connection always establishes quickly and the App is well designed, it’s of little effort.
Verdict
Oral-B stopped adding to pre-existing designs and decided instead, with Braun, to redraw how their toothbrush should look, feel and clean with an all new brush head design and methodology to power it. A really nice upgrade from their previous highest end GENIUS 9000 toothbrush, the style of attentive cleaning is an advancement and the emphasis of using the App to improve dental hygiene with artificial intelligence to track teeth in 3D is the best implementation yet. The Oral-B iO Series 9 toothbrush is definitely deserving of the ‘smart brush’ accolade and is the company's best release yet.