Uwell Caliburn Vape Review
Uwell's Caliburn delivers potent vapour with the push of a button. It's easy to use, has a powerful 520mAh battery and large 2ml capacity pods, but it hits so hard some users might be turned off by the serious throat hit that it delivers with each puff. If you want a very strong throat hit, then this is a good option for you. Otherwise, you may want to consider something a bit more tame like this pod vape here. Overall, it's a pretty good vape for those who want their vapour to hit hard.
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The Caliburn by Uwell is one of the most popular refillable pod vapes ever made, but does that mean it’s one of the best? This review takes a deep dive into this popular vape to determine whether it’s still worth buying today.
In-Depth Caliburn Vape Review
Uwell is one of the biggest names in vaping today and there Caliburn is one of their best sellers to date. It’s well built, offers draw activation and push-button activation, reusable and refillable pods, and doesn’t leak all that often. We’ll discuss that last point in more detail next because a vape that leaks regularly is far from ideal.
The Pods Can Leak
While testing our Caliburn over many months, we found the pods to occasionally leak e-juice. Sure, this happens with some vapes, especially refillable pod vapes it seems. The downside here is that the vape juice not only found its way down into the area where the pod rests inside the top of the vape’s battery but also into our mouths while we were using it. We wouldn’t say that the leaks occurred often enough to make using it a dismal experience, yet we weren’t entirely satisfied as e-juice leaking into your mouth is a less than pleasurable experience.
Keep in mind, your experience may differ. There’s a chance that the leaks occurred because we overloaded the coils by vaping too often. There could be other user errors as well that caused the leaks we ran into. Either way, it wasn’t great when it happened.
Easy To Use, Difficult To Refill
Refilling the pods is about the hardest part of using the Caliburn and they’re pretty darn easy to fill and refill so long as you can manage to get the fill cap off, which can be a little bit of a pain as it’s on there quite snug. That said, it’s a really easy to use device once you manage to pop the cap off the pods to fill them. You can activate its vapour production by pressing the button located on its battery or by hitting it without bothering to press the button – both options work fine. We found it best to prime it a bit by holding down the button for a second or so before hitting it.
If you don’t like having to deal with refilling pods, which can be a little bit of a bother because of how tight the fill caps on the pods are attached, then you’re going to want to look for another vape because that’s one of the Caliburn’s key features.
Endless E-Liquid Options
The biggest benefit of having a vape that uses refillable pods is the endless variety of e-liquid options that can be used with it. Caliburn pods support nic salts so you can use just about any nic salt e-liquid that you find. In addition, you can use just about any freebase nic juice. This means you can choose vape juices from across the spectrum and use them without issue.
Compact Enough But Could Be Smaller
Although it’s small enough for a pocket, it’s not necessarily what you might think of when you think of what a pod vape entails in terms of size. It’s actually a lot longer than you might expect, at least it was when we first came across it. Due to its length, you might actually think it more closely resembles a vape pen than what you’d consider being a pod vape. Either way, it’s small enough for a pocket and that, in our book, does make it reasonably portable.
Quick To Recharge
It only takes about 45 minutes to recharge the battery on this vape and you should manage to get somewhere between 2-3 refills per fully charged battery, which is definitely pretty good as far as battery life goes.
To tell how much battery is left, all you need to do is press the fire button and the LED will glow a particular colour to let you know how much battery is left. Here’s how to decode the LED status indicator:
- Green = 60-100%
- Blue = 30-60%
- Red = Less than 30%
The reason why the battery lasts so long is in part because it’s a 520mAh battery, which is a fairly good size for a portable vape, and because it only has an 11W output. Combine these two factors and it’s only logical that it lasts a while between charges.
Recharging is easy. Like many vapes today, this one uses a micro-USB charger. Simple.
The Vapour Is A Bit Warm
Perhaps there are some vapers who want their vapour to feel warm when they take a puff. If that’s the case, then the Caliburn pods are a good bet because at 1.4ohms the vapour that they produce is fairly warm. To get it even warmer, there’s another pod option available from Uwell that’s designed for the device called Caliburn Koko pods, which operate at 1.2ohms.
Summary: Good For Some, Not So Good For Others
The big takeaway from using this is vape is that it’s a nice vape overall and it hits really hard, which is good for some vapers but definitely not all. If you like to really feel, and we mean really feel, the vapour hit the back of your throat with each hit, well, this is a vape that you may take a liking to. If you’re not too keen on the big throat hit sensation, then you might be better off with another device. The pods hold a good amount of e-liquid, the battery lasts a long time, and it all seems to be sturdy and well manufactured. So what’s bad? Well, there’s the occasional leak, which is never good. There’s also the somewhat large size of the device, which isn’t nearly as compact as some of the other pod vapes. Last but not least, there’s a bit of difficulty with refilling because the pods can be tough to get open when you want to fill them. If you’re looking for a simpler system with awesome flavours, take a look at the Viggo by Vaper Empire. It’s smaller, smoother, and easier to use.