Oral-B iO7
Out of the box, you’ll get the iO7, one refill brush head, a sleek but robust travel case, a travel brush head holder and a magnetic “click” charger. The iO7 gives you access to five cleaning modes – daily clean, whitening, gum care, sensitive and intense – which is probably three more than you really need, but it does allow you to play about with the oscillation angle of the brush and the frequency to find the one you are most comfortable with.
Once you get beyond more than three modes, it’s handy to have a screen to tell you which you’re in, as this means you don’t need to cycle through the different options. The crisp black-and-white OLED display does this with a graphic and text. You only have one choice of handle colour (white alabaster), but this was fine with us as it will match most bathroom décor – if coordinating your toothbrush handle with your towel rail is something that’s important to you.
Opening up the app and establishing a connection with the iO7 will mean that you can monitor how well you are covering the six zones of your mouth in real-time. Well, it should be real-time, but we occasionally noticed some lag between where the brush was in our mouth and the tooth map, although this could have been down to a bad Bluetooth connection. We liked how the app showed the teeth turning from dark blue to light blue and then white as we did a thorough job.
Leaving the brush to charge overnight in the minimal charger (although it only needs three hours), took it up to 100 per cent, which was enough for over two weeks of dutiful brushing. It does, however, remain to be seen how that charging load is affected as we spend more time with the brush.