Oclean X Ultra S Toothbrush Review: Smart (Except when it’s not)

The Oclean X Ultra S does a great job of cleaning teeth and nagging you to get every last area of your mouth, though it’s not always that smart a toothbrush — and its Australian pricing leaves a lot to be desired.

Score: 3/5

In this review

Oclean X Ultra S Design
Oclean X Ultra S Performance
Oclean X Ultra S Conclusion

The smart toothbrush space is one that’s largely dominated by established brands in the dental care field more broadly, so any new contender has to have some serious point of difference.

In the case of the Oclean X Ultra S toothbrush, it’s meant to be around its AI features and spoken word instructions. These do work well, even if they’re a little… confronting… when you first hit them, and ultimately, it does offer a good tooth brushing and cleaning experience.

However, ongoing issues with Wi-Fi connectivity and the way it tracks my daily cleaning are seriously frustrating, and its Australian list price is more than a touch on the high side compared to its international pricing.

Also read:
Colgate Pulse Series 2 Review

Ethical disclaimer: Most vendors don’t ask for electric toothbrushes back so that others can review them because… eww.

That being said, I don’t know if Oclean are going to do so, but I want to be ethical and transparent around this kind of thing where there’s any potential for a perception of bias based on “free” review products. This never has an effect on my assessment of a given product, and I prefer to be upfront about that kind of detail.

Design

The Oclean X Ultra S is a smart electric toothbrush, which means, not shockingly, it looks like an electric toothbrush.

Nobody’s designing these things with side-mounted sentry guns or anything, though there are a few interesting tweaks in the Oclean X Ultra S’s design.

The Oclean X Ultra S comes in either a black or light green finish; it’s the latter I’ve been using to clean my own teeth for the past few weeks. Before you worry, no, I’m not photographing it in my mouth, because nobody besides my dentist needs to see my own chompers up that close.

The green colour is an interesting choice; it kind of reminds me of the colour that some hospitals used to be painted in when I was much younger, but maybe I’m just dating myself there.

The Oclean X Ultra S uses a typical arrangement of removable toothbrush heads, with a choice of three – Ultra White, Ultra Clean and Ultra Gum Care – in the box.

I’ve only got the one set of teeth – you’re probably similar — so for this review I opted for the Ultra Gum Care brush. One nice touch here that you don’t see with every electric toothbrush head is that the back of the brush has a soft rubber tongue scraper. A two pack of replacement heads in a single style of your choosing will run you $49.95 AUD, about typical for most smart toothbrush heads.

All on-device functions are handled via the touchscreen on the front, with a small power button underneath it.

Charging is inductive, the standard method for most smart toothbrushes, though the Oclean base is one that entirely wraps around the Oclean X Ultra S toothbrush.

I do like this approach as it makes it much less likely that the toothbrush will be knocked over or off its base if it’s sharing bathroom sink space with other items and somebody reaches out and bumps it.

The one catch here is that unlike some competing models, you don’t get a wall plug charger in the box, just a terminating USB-A cable. It’s also a fixed cable, which I’m less fond of in design terms, because it means when it frays or breaks down the line, it’s completely useless for most consumers. You could conceivably get handy with a soldering iron if you’re that type, but most people are not.

The Oclean X Ultra S also comes with its own travel case, but this isn’t just a simple plastic tube.

Pink and green is a… choice, and honestly it wouldn’t be mine.
The black model appears to come with a less extroverted black case if this matters to you.

It is mostly plastic, to be honest, but the key differentiator here is that it also incorporates a USB-C charging socket at the base, so you can keep the Oclean X Ultra S powered up on your travels – or at home if the charging base breaks or is lost, I guess.

Performance

You can’t have a smart toothbrush without an app in 2024, and in the case of the Oclean X Ultra S it’s the Oclean Care+ app for iOS or Android.

It’s used for pairing the Oclean X Ultra S up to your phone and your home’s Wi-Fi network as well as tracking your ongoing tooth brushing progress.

Setting up the Oclean Care+ app is simple enough, requiring registration of an email address to get you started, as well as knowing your home Wi-Fi network settings — more on that anon.

From there, it’s a question of choosing your brushing methodology of choice – and one big plus for the Oclean X Ultra S is that you have a LOT of choices.

Just on the toothbrush alone with a swipe you can choose between Unlimited Clean, Sunrise Soothing, Sunset Clearout, Sensitive Gum Care and Whitening Polishing modes, but within the app there’s another 14 modes, including settings for travel cleaning and braces use… and that’s not even getting into custom modes where you select brushing duration, brushing modes and applicable brushing force.

Most of us will probably just find a comfortable/good setting for our own dental needs, really, so while I’ve played around with the other toothbrush settings, I settled on the gum care routine as my brushing routine of choice.

The Oclean X Ultra S’s big party piece is that it’s a talking toothbrush. A lot of the smart toothbrushes in this category will typically vibrate to let you know that it’s time to switch cleaning areas, but the Oclean X Ultra S does it a little different, because it uses a bone conduction speaker to let you know when you should alter your cleaning style.

That’s a very useful feature, because on some competing toothbrushes you definitely can miss those vibrating alerts, but there’s no way you’ll miss your toothbrush talking to you. That’s especially true because (at least for the English language voice I tested with) it’s a fairly high- pitched voice that sounds like it’s a haunted schoolgirl giving you instructions.

Which is, even after a couple of weeks of testing, still deeply creepy to me.

Even though I knew it was a talking toothbrush, the first time it told me to switch the area I was cleaning, I nearly dropped the Oclean X Ultra S.

It’s unavoidably creepy, because there’s not a great way to have voices coming from your teeth without at least some element of this in play.

The actual tooth cleaning experience of the Oclean X Ultra S is genuinely very good indeed, with a strong enough motion to clean teeth without feeling too brutal – and of course, if you did find that it was rougher than your mouth wanted to accommodate, you could set up a custom routine to help mitigate that. On that count, the Oclean X Ultra S scores very highly.

It does fall into the typical problem that every smart toothbrush with a screen falls into, in that the timing information, along with graphics meant to display where it thinks you’ve brushed well or not enough are on a screen in your hand while the toothbrush head is in your gob, meaning that it’s all but impossible to read on the fly unless you have transparent hands.

This is admittedly where creepy-tooth-ghost-girl-voice can at least help with the timing.

The Oclean X Ultra S goes down the very standard gamified route of tracking your toothbrushing activity within the app, giving you (in theory) better guidance on how to keep your teeth in optimal condition.

194/180 for tooth brushing. Truly, I a teeth cleaning master.

Here I did hit a couple of problems however that did leave me less than satisfied.

Firstly, there’s the question of Wi-Fi connectivity. It’ll only connect to 2.4Ghz networks – and it does warn you of this upfront – but through my review period I’ve had periods where it’s simply dropped network connectivity, despite the relevant network being active the entire time.

It wasn’t forgetting the settings, because going back into Wi-Fi settings meant it could see the network and knew what the password was. It just wasn’t choosing to connect, and the issue here is that unless I checked that, it often wouldn’t remember my last brushing session, and I’d lose my “gamified” score and ongoing tracking of my dental health.

A full reboot and reset of the Oclean X Ultra S seems to have maybe mitigated this – in that it’s been happier for the past day or so after doing that – but it really shouldn’t happen in the first place.

The Oclean X Ultra S promises to track your tooth brushing habits, and this is a claim that plenty of smart brushes have made, but I’m yet to find one where I’m convinced it’s doing so in a particularly accurate way.

The Oclean X Ultra S seems determined to tell me that I rarely brush my upper left set of teeth well at all, even if I only brush there, and it always tells me that I’m applying too much pressure for the first four seconds of brushing, despite the warning lights in the base never coming on to indicate that. That’s maybe a software calibration issue, but again, it’s less than desirable in a premium toothbrush.

Battery

On the battery life front, the Oclean X Ultra S claims up to 45 days of battery life, and I’ve not had it for 45 days away from a charger to totally verify that.

Realistically unless you’re undertaking some particularly lengthy desert walks in the near future that should be enough for nearly anyone’s needs – but I can’t comment on whether it holds up that much.

Again, most users are primarily (I suspect) going to be dropping it onto its charging base a couple of minutes after brushing – and as your dentist would no doubt like to remind you, that should happen a couple of times per day.

Oclean X Ultra S: Alex’s Verdict

As a smart toothbrush designed to keep my mouth optimally hygienic, the Oclean X Ultra S is great.

It’s done a superb job of keeping my teeth clean, and while I do still find it a tad unnerving, the use of voice coach to get me to switch up my cleaning areas does work surprisingly well. I must clean my teeth, otherwise the ghost girl will get me when I sleep!

However, I can’t ignore the Wi-Fi issues I’ve had, because that’s going to detract from how well it can track my overall brushing effectiveness over time.

Its in-mouth tracking is also slightly less than ideal, though to be fair to the Oclean X Ultra S I’ve tested more than a few smart toothbrushes that have made similar claims and found most of them lacking.

Then there’s the list price. Premium toothbrushes do attract premium pricing, and while at the time of writing the Oclean X Ultra S is selling in Australia at $224.95 as a Black Friday deal, I have to assess it at its “full” price, because that’s what’s been stated as its regular price here.

Which is problematic when you consider that in the US, the same toothbrush sells at a regular price (not sale price) of $US129.99. Even allowing for GST, that should come out at around $220, not $449.95.

Or in other words, at Black Friday sale price it’s fine and in line with what Oclean charges for it internationally, but it’s not a “discount” in real world terms.

At full price, we’re paying way too much of the Australia tax for it.

Oclean X Ultra S: Pricing and availability

The Oclean X Ultra S retails in Australia with an official pricing of $449.95 through the Shaver Shop.

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