Dyson vacuums have had a pretty consistent look for the past few years. Each model in the famed brand's series of powerful stick vacuums features a hefty handle containing a dustbin, battery, and motor that’s connected to the head of the vacuum by a long tube. It's a design you'll find across other brands' cordless vacuums, too. But with the new PencilVac model, Dyson breaks the mold.

Announced last spring and initially launched in Japan and Korea last year, the PencilVac Fluffycones cordless vacuum fits all of its components into a 4-pound package with a slim 38-mm (1.5-inch) handle. There are a few trade-offs with this streamlined design: It's got half the battery life of Dyson's other cordless vacuums and can only be used on hard floors.

Even with those caveats, it's still the vacuum I find myself reaching for to keep daily debris and my cat's litter tracks under control. It makes for a great companion vacuum to a robot vac-mop that does the bulk of the work every few days, and it's as lightweight and easy to maneuver as a Swiffer broom. It's a vacuum I genuinely enjoy using, and I'm hoping it's a design we see more and more in Dyson vacuums.

The PencilVac gets rid of the bulky topper you'd find on any other cordless vacuum, hiding the motor, battery, and dustbin into a 38-mm-wide handle with two buttons and a small screen. Dyson manages this by shrinking the Hyperdymium motor down to 28 mm while still packing in a decent amount of power. It's not as strong as a traditional Dyson stick vacuum—the PencilVac has 55 air watts, less than a quarter of the V15 Detect's power—but for cleaning hard floors, rather than pulling dust and debris up from carpets and rugs, that works just fine.