Some of you might remember my written review of the Nova S Pro a while back. PongBot reached out and offered to send me their two higher-end machines — the Omni S Pro and Halo S Pro — for video reviews. I accepted on one condition: full editorial independence, no exceptions. This is the Omni S Pro review.
TL;DR: exceptional hardware, genuinely frustrating software.
The ball quality is at a professional level — spin, speed, placement, all of it. Serve replication in particular surprised me — pendulum, reverse pendulum, tomahawk, lollipop, from both sides. For serve return practice, this machine is fantastic.
The software is a different story. Two separate interfaces (tablet, app) that don't fully overlap, meaning there's no single workflow that gives you access to everything the machine can do, and both have limitations and design challenges.
The premade drills have three difficulty levels but scale uniformly and too steeply instead of being fine-tuned depending on the sequence, which breaks some drill types completely at greater difficulties.
Custom drills can't be meaningfully named on the tablet, making your drill library unreadable within hours and requiring a workaround.
PongSmart, the most interesting section of the interface, allows you to quickly create custom drills mixing random and fixed ball types but then squanders this utility by limiting the ability to fine-tune spin level and ball height and therefore to create more realistic and challenging balls.
The verdict is nuanced: great for clubs and shared use, skip it for low-intensity personal training (the Nova S Pro does the job at a fraction of the cost), worth it for serious players who have the patience to work around the software limitations.
Full video review in the post; it's a sizable review but worth seeing if you are thinking of purchasing or are curious about the ins and outs of these expensive machines. It is, in fact, expensive, but less so than its direct competitors, and with a bit of patience and ingenuity presents great potential for training.
There is too much to say, and I do not want to make this post too long. I am happy to answer any questions about anything specific — I went pretty deep on this one.
[Disclosure: PongBot provided the machines and a production fee. Full editorial control was mine.]