So another review, and another big name from the vaping world lands on my doormat. The Innokin Gala is an open pod system and follows on from the huge hit that was the Innokin EQs pod mod.
Innokin have a superb track record of beginner/mouth to lung vape kits, producing what was one of the best selling series in the vaping world, the latest in the series being the Innokin Endura T18ii.
So I have high hopes for the Gala kit.
What Can We Expect From The Gala Pod System by Innokin?
The Innokin Gala, as mentioned, is an open pod system so you can refill the pod with your own choice of e-liquid. So once you start to lose flavour and the coil reaches the end of its life, you chuck the whole pod.
It comes with the latest PLEX3D designed coils in a variety of colours and has an LED light bar that you can change to display a different colour when you take a vape. The change is made by tapping and shaking the device. Interesting. Let’s take a closer look.
The product was supplied for the purposes of this review by Innokin, thank you. As always my opinions are my own.
In the box
- Innokin Gala Battery
- 0.5Ω Pod (preinstalled)
- 0.8Ω Pod
- Pack of 3 E-liquid Bottle Tip Adapters
- Lanyard
- Warranty Card
- Warranty Booklet
- Tip Adapter Guide
- Quick Start Guide
- Battery Care Guide
Specs
- Dimensions: 109mm x 25mm x 11mm
- Weight: 50g
- Tank Capacity: 2ml
- Battery Capacity: 500mAh
- Draw Activated
- Tap and Shake to change LEDs
Design and Build Quality
The Innokin Gala comes in a number of different colours, I have the Saphire, and it has a nice stylised G logo and the word Gala in silver.
Below that you have the light bar running down most of the battery (more on that in a moment).
Picking it up you immediately feel like it’s a nice piece of kit, just enough weight to feel quality without being heavy.
It’s really discrete and fits nicely in the hand with the curved edges, despite having a shiny surface I never felt like I didn’t have a grip on it.
Controls and LEDs
There’s no buttons as it’s a draw activated device. The only control you have is over the LED light bar that is about 2mm wide and is about half the length of the complete kit.
This will light up when you put a pod in it and after you’ve taken a vape, to show you battery life.
Confusingly putting a pod in will show the battery one way (colour of flash) and after vaping it will use another (number of flashes). This is because you can set it to be any of the 7 colour options when you vape on it.
3 Taps
The instructions tell you that you need to tap the “G” logo 3x quickly to light up the LEDs with whatever colour is currently set, then if you shake the device it will cycle through your 7 different options Blue, Magenta, Red, Pink, Yellow, Aqua, Green and Off.
Then you either wait 4 seconds or take a puff on it to set the colour… Except that “Tap the device” doesn’t really describe what you need to do.
I spent a good 15 minutes touching the logo, tapping it, harder, softer, slower, quicker. Until eventually I just repeatedly ended up tapping away to get it to light up.
Turns out that it’s not a touch sensitive button, it doesn’t respond to the deformation of the plastic casing, or anything terribly sophisticated. It seems like it’s a simple accelerometer that is calibrated for short, sharp, shocks.
I actually found out the most reliable way of getting this to work, was holding the base of the device and flicking the device to hit my other hand fairly forcefully.
Similarly if you do this 5 times, you get “Light Show” mode, which cycles through the 7 colours continuously until you either perform the secret handshake again, or wait 30 minutes.
Not entirely sure that’s a great idea if you’re trying to prolong your battery life. Speaking of which!
Battery Life
After recently testing a device with a 1,000mAh battery that could give me two days with a good tail wind, I thought I’d happily get a day.
Unfortunately during my normal day I walked to work (15 minutes) vaped on my lunch break (45 minutes) and vaped on the walk home… or I would have done if it had managed to last my whole walk!
This is not an all day device, and I think it’s probably best suited to sitting in a shirt pocket for when you’re out and about and don’t want to deal with a larger device for those quick hits of nicotine.
Pods and Filling
You get two pods in the kit, the 0.5Ω pod is preinstalled, and you get a spare 0.8Ω.
I’m always pleased to see pod manufacturers include a spare, not enough do it so it’s great to see Innokin have listened to the wants of vapers here.
The other plus point is that you can easily tell them apart as the 0.8Ω coil has a bright green surround and the 0.5Ω is black.
On one side of pod is the silicon tab that you lift up to fill with a stopper that fits inside the fill port.
This is without doubt the single worst experience I have had filling any tank or pod system.
Tip Adapters
Update – Having experimented more with this, I would say to just ignore the adapters. I think this may have been Innokin being a little overly helpful! As they were included in the kit I used them.
I’ve now tried filling it with standard 10ml bottles as well as short-fills, and provided you take it easy, things work a lot better without using the adapters.
I even tried the adapters on the end of a glass pipette, and they still didn’t seem overly helpful. So my advice is just to pretend they don’t exist and make sure you let the tip of your bottles go all the way into the pod, so it doesn’t end up creating a seal of e-liquid around the fill hole.
You’ll be a lot less frustrated if you do. Once you’ve filled it, remember to let it sit for a few minutes before chucking it in the device and taking a draw, otherwise you’ll just burn your coil and get a really nasty taste!
My Previous Experience
The 3 tip adapters that you get in the box are there because there’s only a small diameter fill hole, and there is no secondary hole to release the air.
Coupled with the fact it’s quite a deep hole that your tip has to travel down, you quickly end up with an airlock and juice spilling over the top of the pod.
I feel like the tip adapters were included as an afterthought when they realised they’d made it impossible to fill.
They are supposed to fit onto the end of an e-liquid bottle and are very narrow so you put it down into the pod and it allows the air to escape around it.
Except they don’t fit tightly onto the bottle, so filling it up becomes a three handed job where you need to hold the pod, hold the the bottle, hold the tip adapter.
And the reason you need to hold the tip adapter is because if it you put it all the way into the pod, you end up drawing e-liquid back up, and because it doesn’t seal over the bottle, it just ends up spilling out the top of the adapter.
Similarly if you try to position it near the top of the tank, you run into the problem of the narrow but deep hole, and once again you form an airlock… and spill e-liquid all over the pod.
Lanyard
Innokin has some really nice photos of the pod kit in a leather pouch with lanyard. This is available as an extra and not what comes with the kit.
In the box you get a really basic lanyard with a small leather type loop that you put the device through. Then I guess you just have to hope it doesn’t fall out? As there’s no way of really tightening it on the device and nothing solid to attach it to.
I think if I was the sort of person who likes to hang vape devices around my neck, I would probably spend the money and get that rather than use the lanyard. Although I haven’t had it drop out, it still feels a bit precarious!
How Does the Innokin Gala perform?
So after all of that, how does it vape?
When I wrote this review originally I didn’t have a good time with the 0.8Ohm coil, I was getting dry hits after every 3 or 4 drags.
Turns out that my 0.8Ω, and possibly the 0.5Ω, pod were duds. Innokin kindly supplied me with a new device and pods for further testing (thank you!).
I can confirm I have been quite happily chain vaping on both the pods.
I have pushed these far more than someone who would typically be vaping on this type of device, and I have not been able to replicate the dry hits I got from my first pod.
I switched from my normal 50/50 Berry Ice from Vape Simple to the Berry N’ Ice 50 Large which is a 70VG/30PG, and it’s been wicking with absolutely no problems as I chain vaped.
Lots of little bubbles appearing and all sprinting to the top. Interestingly the e-liquid seems to seems to even out a lot quicker on the replacement pods, this is both when you’re filling it, and when you’re vaping on it.
Provided the pod is pointing down, like it would be when you’re filling it, the two sides of the e-liquid quickly level out. I’m not sure what it was that was causing my issues the first time around, but I am going to be scoring this based on my replacement pods and pretending that the drip tip adapters don’t exist.
I think of the two pods, the 0.5Ω Plex3D Mesh coil is the winner in terms of flavour, but there’s not a lot in it.
Certainly when I’m vaping things that have cooling hit, the 0.5Ω just manages to bring that out a little bit more, and I prefer the fractionally airier MTL draw you get from it.
In terms of cloud, this isn’t the kind of device that pumps out the vapour. It still does a decent job though.
Pros
- Good flavour, especially on the Mesh pod (0.5Ohm)
- Nice, sleek look
- Well built, feels good in the hand
- LEDs are kind of cool
Cons
- Superfluous drip tip adapters
- Short battery life
Final Review Verdict
After my initial it’s fair to say I’ve been brought round a bit on this little pod, it’s still not exactly my cup of tea, but when it’s working how it should be, it’s a capable little device.
If you’re anything like me, then you’ll want to use absolutely everything that you receive, it’s because of this that I persevered for so long with the drip tip adapters.
Once I stopped trying to use them, my levels of frustration quickly disappeared, and I was left with a nice flavourful little pod with a rather sexy body.
Battery life is still going to be the thing that stops this being an all day vape, but as a backup device, it performs admirably.
I am going to be scoring this based on my replacement pods and pretending that the drip tip adapters don’t exist!
Have you used the Innokin Gala Pod System? If so we would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
My device keeps turning it self of can’t seem to get it to work any ideas
Also, after like a minute of plugging it in it goes green
How long does it take to fully charge? I like the vape but no matter how long I leave it charging it the light doesn’t go green it goes yellow. Also, how can you change the lights as shown in the leaflet ?
Hi Zoe,
I found that it took about 1hr 15min to charge (or thereabouts). Though I have heard of people having issues with charging it, I’d recommend reaching out to Innokin support directly if you’re having problems.
As for getting the lights to change colour, it took me a long time to get the knack of it on my review unit. I found the simplest way was to hold it with the mouthpiece in your hand, then slap it into your other hand so it gets a bit of a “bump”.
Last time I looked, there’s a decent video of someone doing this on Innokin’s website. Once you make it glow, you can then shake it to change the colour.
Hope that helps a little! And thanks for reading the review.
Will
We have been using the gala for several months now and I really like it. It’s light weight and low clouding is a must so it’s perfect. We on the other have loved and use the enclosed tips! They work perfectly with little to no over runs unlike when we try to use our juice bottles directly.
Glad you like it! Although I didn’t get on with the tips myself, I’m glad you’ve found them useful.
Will
I bought the gala not because I’m a starter in vaping but I wanted something small to take when I pop round to the shops or go to a retail park with my son . Its ideal for that.
The 0.5 ohm coil kept burning my lip if I did too many draws in a row but the 0.8 home performed much better.
Filling is indeed a messy business and difficult to get both sides level but I use a 2 ml syringe with the needle right at the bottom and its much better.
It is a system with high maintenance regime but as I said I have several mods I can take for longer use.
For my particular uses its fine and I like the ergonomics and the led strip. If I wanted a full day vape off it I would have been disappointed and I think as a starter vape mod it may well put new vapers off the idea.
As a vapour of 5 years I have all the kit to make this pod system work