Others say...

"Mixed blessing"
I've had this item for about five months now, mostly to clean cat hair off the futon. So it sees only light duty.

No complaints whatsoever for the first three months or so - it did a fine job. But I was waiting to see whether its performance would deteriorate over time and/or it would overheat and shut down, as other customers have noted.

For the past couple months or so, it's done just that: Increasingly, it leaves the cat hair in concentrated streaks, rather than picking it up. And it overheats and shuts down very quickly - usually within 3-4 minutes. When it behaves this way, I can almost always tell in advance - because as soon as I turn it on it's even louder than usual, and the noise has a higher pitch than usual - almost as if the unit has a broken seal somewhere, thus neutralizing the suction power and causing it to work too hard and thus overheat.

It works just fine - when it's working properly. I just have concerns about how much longer mine will continue to work before it dies completely...

"belts are impossible to find"
This hand vac works great. It does have it's drawbacks, which are major ones to me.

#1 - the store I bought it at does not sell the replacement belts. After looking at 5 local stores, 2 of which sold this model, I looked on the internet. The only place I found them at is fantom's own website, for 2 of them it's 7.95, plus an addition $5 for shipping, the price breaks down to $7.50 per replacement belt. Considering the belt only lasted us 4 uses with this, it's not cost effective to buy this or encourage anyone buy it.

#2 - As with all vacuum cleaners, long hair gets wrapped up in the roller. However, this is the first one that I've encountered that is difficult to remove all of the hair that gets caught up in the roller and the sides of it. Since I and my daughter both have long hair, this is a problem. Too much hair gets caught in the side of the roller and it causes the belt to work harder which causes it to break. But cleaning all the hair out is a huge task that takes over an hour.

If you don't have a problem paying $7.50 per replacement belt and you don't have any long haired people living in your house, this would be acceptable. Otherwise, look for something else and save yourself the time and money.

"Doesn't Suck... and that's not good"
My wife bought this vacuum for Christmas 2005, here it is May 2006 and it has completely lost all suction. When it did work it did a pretty good job although is was terribly loud and got very warm, almost hot.
I wrote to the company that manufactures it... We'll see how good their customer service is.

UPDATE...
I wrote an earlier review which stated that the vacuum we purchased stopped sucking completely. I contacted the company and after just a few emails they decided to replace it for no charge. I received the new vacuum which I believe is actually a re-furbished one but it works fine. We'll see if the same problem reoccurs. For now, I give it 3 stars for good customer service.

"Best hand vac with belt-driven brush?"
The only thing I have to compare this product to is the old red Dirt Devil with the type G bag. The Dirt Devil was always a bit of a pain: The bags were hard to find, and the drive belt had an annoying habit of jumping off the spindle. This one has neither problem. Maybe I haven't used it heavily enough to encounter the reliability problems another reviewer mentioned, but so far, no parts seem in danger of falling off. Also, yes, this unit will disappoint you if you bought it for deep-cleaning upholstery. Show me a hand vac or any tool for $50 that will do that job. I have used it to clean fine Masonite sawdust out of new carpet (don't ask), and although it wasn't perfect, it did get most of it, and the HEPA filter made sure the vacuum held onto any dust that went into it.

You do have to at least empty the dust cup after every use if you want any performance out of this thing. Sometimes I wonder what good a HEPA filter does if I'm just going to walk over to the trash can and open the vacuum, releasing all that dust back into the air. But I guess I could take it outside if I weren't so lazy.

So-- maybe not a professional piece of industrial-strength gear, but better than comparable products, and for fifty bucks, I can't complain.

"The only thing from the new Fantoms worth purchasing"
I have owned a Fantom Thunder for the past 5 years and continue to love it. When I saw that Fantom had a hand vac, I was skeptical. It was a Euro-Pro product, and I had read many reviews saying that Euro-Pro products are POS's. I bought it from Best Buy in November, and I was satisfied at how well it cleaned. I had no pieces falling off or electrical problems, but I exchanged it for a King of the Hill Season 2. Then I read the reviews for this product and found they were mostly 4 or 5 star, then I decided that I wanted to get it again. Best Buy had one left in the box on clearance for 21.99, I bought it along with the 2 year replacement to avoid the horrible customer service, plus if it breaks, I'll get my money back. This machine did great in my car, and it picks up pet hair well. I give this 4 stars because the Tapclean filter is a pain to clean and I don't like that it's in the dust cup, but I found that most other hand vacs have a filter in the cup. If Euro-Pro made this with the cyclonic technology and filtering system the original Fantoms had, I would give it 5 stars.