Uwell Crown Pod System Review – Tyrannosaurus Rex

Disclosure: The Uwell Crown Pod System in this review was sent to me free of charge from 2Fdeal  (check out their Daily Flash Sale HERE).  I will endeavor to provide a fair, unbiased, and comprehensive review of the product described below. All subjective thoughts and opinions expressed herein are entirely my own and have not been influenced or dictated by the manufacturer or distributor of the product. The product described in the review below contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.

Hail to the King

Let me go ahead and get this out, front and center. Of the dozen-plus pod/AIO vapes I’ve owned and/or tried, the Uwell Crown Pod mod has, far and away, the best flavor production out of any of them. Better than the Smok RPM40, better than the Artery Pal II, better than the Voopoo Vinci, better than the Geekvape Frenzy. In my humble opinion, the Crown legitimately has as good a flavor production as a mesh RDA, and that is no small feat. However, the journey I’ve been on to come to this opinion has taken its toll on me, both mentally and physically.

The Struggle

The first step in the comedy of errors surrounding the review for this vape, I suppose, goes back several months to this past holiday season. I accepted an offer from Jeremy to review the Vandy Vape Mesh V2 RDA (which remains my favorite RDA and that I use every single day). Then a month and a half pass and I’m sitting at my PC with nothing to write about. So, I shoot him an email and say, hey, I’ll pick up some slack while I’m waiting for my next eJuice samples to come in and do a hardware review for the site. After a bit of wrangling, the Uwell Crown Pod System is sent to me from sunny Hong Kong via 2-day shipping. Except…it’s not. The day it’s supposed to get here, and suddenly the tracking website reads, “Date of arrival: Unknown.” A week passes.

Finally out of exasperation, I call the shipping company. They initiate a trace, and it turns out, the package had missed its connecting flight. Now I know what you’re thinking, and I asked myself the same question: How can an inanimate object…miss its flight? In any case, 20 hours later, the parcel was in my hands. You can imagine my relief and joy at receiving this thing. Not only was I hyped up about the device itself, but now I could finally get stuck in and back to work. Squirting one of my favorite juices into the sub-ohm pod, I left it sitting and chilling on my desk while I watched a couple of YouTube videos, and after about half an hour, I popped it into the mod with a satisfying tactile click and took a nice, deep direct-to-lung hit…

…of brimstone and death. My single and only sub-ohm pod, fresh out of the box, was DOA.

In order to understand my predicament, I can only just barely tolerate salt nic juices. The amount of nicotine in them irritates my throat badly, to the point where I cough more using salt nic than I ever did when I was a smoker. Typically, every other puff of a salt nic juice/device will make it feel like someone is scrubbing the back of my throat with steel wool. And now, I am confronted with a review, that I MUST complete within two weeks, and that it appears I will have to use salt nic for the duration. I called every vape shop in a fifty-mile radius, trying to find replacement pods for this thing. Not a single shop had any. So I bit the bullet, crammed salt nic into the appropriate pod, and went a-puffin’.

So now, here we are, a week and a half later. I have consumed more nicotine in the past ten days than I have in the past three months. I have a sore throat, a hoarse, dry cough that liquids don’t soothe, a salt nic pod that starting to taste burnt, and a review to get hammered out. Let’s do this.

Uwell Crown Pod System Features / Specs

• Dimensions: 95.6mm by 30mm by 18mm
• Colorways: Black, Grey, Blue, and Red
• Uwell BEIN Chipset
• Integrated 1250mAh Rechargeable Battery
• Micro USB Charging
• Max Wattage Output: 25W
• Zinc Alloy Chassis Construction
• Dual Firing Mechanisms: Firing Button & Draw-Activated
• 3 Level LED Battery Life Indicator Light
• Max E-liquid Capacity: 3mL
• Top Fill System
• Magnetic Pod Connection
• Adjustable Airflow Control Switch
• Multiple Protection Features

Packaging & Presentation

The Uwell Crown Pod System comes in a small, lovely little box, with a full-color image of the mod on the front along with embellishments of gold leaf. The back features a list of contents, the typical Prop 65 Warning (in spite of there being no nicotine in the product), and Uwell’s address in China. The flap on top should have an unbroken authenticity seal holding it closed. Cracking open the package and taking a look over the contents, you will find: the mod itself; two pods, one for freebase juice and one for salt nic; warranty cards and instructions; and teeny tiny USB cable. The Crown comes in black, gray, blue, and red; my Crown came in black.

Design

The first thing you notice is the heft of the device; it’s substantial, the unfilled weight 2.15 ounces or 61 grams, equivalent to the weight of a standard tennis ball. The upper front of the device has a small square button with a Crown logo embossed on it, and an LED near the bottom front for indicating use/charge. Five clicks on, five clicks off. The button can be used to fire the Crown, or you can draw activate it. Personally, I feel the button is a bit superfluous and risks firing when in one’s pocket or purse, but it’s a minor gripe.

The 1.0Ω salt nic pod features a dark plastic reservoir and a black gasket, and the freebase 0.6Ω pod features a clear reservoir and a bright orange gasket. Both pod types have a mouthpiece that pops off, which conceals the fill port. There’s a floral, almost paisley stripe going down the center of both front and back of the mod, and while hard to tell from images, it has a smooth, not raised or embossed finish. It’s very comfortable to hold in practically any way you’d like to. The ergonomics are great.

Features & Functionality

One of the unique features of the Uwell Crown Pod System is that the pods have user-definable airflow control, rather than static AFC like most other pod systems. On the side of each pod is a small slider that adjusts from nearly closed to wide open. This allows you to get a decent but airy MTL draw on the sub-ohm pod or a very tight draw on the nic-salt pod. You do have to remove the pod from the unit in order to change it, but once you have it dialed into a level you’re comfortable with, you can leave it set to that for the lifespan of the pod.

The impression that I’ve gotten from others online is that you can expect between one to two weeks of use from a pod before it begins to decline. I used mine heavily for ten days in a row before it started to give up the ghost. The pods themselves are between 4-5 dollars apiece, but as time goes on that price will certainly drop. You should find you have no trouble filling the pods with the normal needle-tips on the majority of eJuice bottles, but those with twist-style tops or eyedroppers won’t fit into the fill port.

Flavor

As for flavor, I cannot tell a lie, it is the tops deluxe. As some of you may know, I vastly prefer Rebuildables to Tanks and prefer mesh RDAs over coil-style RDAs. To my mind, mesh just has a better flavor output than normal coils, and whether that’s factual or anecdotal, it stands up in my line of reasoning. So, it’s no faint praise when I say that the Uwell Crown Pod System produces flavor on par with my mesh RDAs. In fact, the only other pod system I’ve used that came close to the same amount of flavor production was another Uwell product, the Amulet. And while that was a semi-gimmicky device, it could fill your pie hole from teeth to tonsils with a chunk of taste. The Crown does the same and better. While I can’t speak on how it handles freebase juices due to the circumstances I wrote about above, for salt nic, it was bordering on revelatory.

Uwell Crown Pod System – Final Thoughts

I’m really beginning to grow an affinity for Uwell products, thanks to my experiences with them in the past and with this pod system. They don’t make junk, that’s for certain, Quality Control notwithstanding. If you’re looking for a first timer pod system, to replace a discontinued one, or to take the next step beyond disposables, I would definitely put my seal of approval on the Uwell Crown Pod System. If you already own a pod system that’s come out in the past twelve months (especially a prior Uwell device like the Caliburn or the Koko), then I would probably suggest waiting on a sale or a price drop. And I cannot recommend enough that if you do decide to grab one, get a couple packs of replacement pods at the same time. Mine are still in the mail, and I miss using it already.

Lukas

Having started vaping as a way to stop using cigarettes, Lukas metamorphosed into a regular vape enthusiast over the past seven years. Utilizing his extensive knowledge and problem-solving skills as a regular at his local vape shop, it only made sense to parley that, along with his writing skills, into making vape juice reviews. While conspicuously absent from social media, the 35-year-old former chef now uses his free time by making spectacular home-cooked meals, reading voraciously, and dabbling in multiplayer computer games. Oh yeah, and he vapes too.