I've only used dual spinning beaters kind of mixers and found the idea of a single beater intriguing, that the beater spins around the bowl instead of the bowl spinning around the beaters. I've used hand mixers for years - you know the drill...hold the mixer, push it around the bowl trying to capture all the dry spots on the bottom and along the walls of the bowl while wishing I had a third hand to use a spatula to scrape the stubborn stuff into the blend. That awful sound when it smacks against the inside of an aluminum or ceramic bowl. This mixer doing the work instead of me, yeah. Sounded good. One of my Christmas traditions is a cheese ball. If you've ever made a cheese ball you know that even with the ingredients at room temp it's a bugger to mix by hand. No matter how you cut, slice or dice it, it's a bit of work and still never as smooth as one from the store. Using this mixer, I put the ingredients into the metal bowl, lowered the beater and let it do it's job. You know it's a winner when people ask for the recipe. It turned out better than any previous year's because the mixer blended all the ingredients into a creamy blend better than any I'd done by hand or with the hand mixers. When using it to make a cake, maybe it was impatience or just the way it works, but a couple time I stopped the machine to hand scrape the cake mix from the inside walls. It's a tight squeeze because the beater fills most of the bowl. Luckily I own a thin spatula or I would've had to lift the mixer head to get to the inside of the bowl. If you buy this, you'll definitely want a thin spatula so you can quickly jam the dry batter down while the beater is moving around. After all the batter is moist, it's divine to watch the machine do it's magic instead of me moving the mixer body around trying to ensure everything's evenly moist and blended. Even better is that I can walk away and tend to something else while the machine chugs along. I'm definitely a reformed handheld mixer person but still deciding if this single beater outperforms a two beater mixer. Maybe the lesson is no matter which one you use, there's still an amount of scraping to be done. Also, when adding ingredients such as the cheese ball mixture, be sure to open a spot in the middle of the bowl. For it to start, the mixer head has to click into place and can't do that if thick ingredients prevent it from dropping down far enough into the bowl.