Our Innokin MVP4 review takes a look at the latest box mod from the legendary series. With a maximum power output of 100W, a TC mode supporting all major TC coil types and a huge in-built 4,500 mAh battery, it looks promising. But does it really deliver?
Is it worth buying?
Each iteration of the MVP series has brought massive improvements, and the MVP4 is no exception to this rule. The battery life is exceptional, it hits hard and it can do pretty much anything you’ll need to as a vaper.
Longer-term vapers might miss an adjustable TCR option, and hardcore cloud-chasers might balk at the 100W maximum power output, but for most vapers the MVP4 offers more than enough power and packs plenty of features. If you’re new to mods, for $57.95 it’s a fantastic deal and the performance will blow you away.
The big benefit for new vapers is the huge integrated battery and the fact that you vape while charging – you can rest assured you won’t run out of battery when you really need it. Longer-term vapers may have comparable devices already, so the benefits are a little more limited, but it’s still a great mod for an excellent price.
Full review
The iTaste MVP 2 was my first ever box mod. It was a watershed moment in my journey into vaping: it packed all the capabilities of the tube mods we’d all become accustomed to but in a more portable, longer-lasting form. It became my go-to-device pretty quickly, but with how quickly the technology evolves, it wasn’t long before more powerful and feature-packed box mods took its place.
But the MVP series still holds a special place for me and many other veteran vapers, and Innokin hasn’t forgotten about it either. The MVP3 improved the offerings substantially, but the newest model promises to blow all the previous iterations out of the water. With temperature control, a 100W maximum output and a huge 4,500 mAh battery, the MVP4 looks set to take the series to the next level. Our Innokin MVP4 review takes a look at what the mod can do to see if it’s worth picking up.
What You Get
The Innokin iTaste MVP4 comes in a simple box, with a silver outer sleeve containing all of the information about the device, as well as containing a scratch-off authentication code. Inside, the MVP4 sits in a foam insert, with a USB cable beside it and the manual tucked underneath it. This is all you get in the kit. It’s a pretty basic offering, but with an internal battery mod, this is all you really need.
Innokin MVP4 Review – The Design
Appearance and Layout
The Innokin MVP 4.0 has a very similar look to the MVP 3.0, with a front face containing the fire button, an OLED display screen and two adjustment buttons, as well as a USB charging port at the bottom. The USB output port (for using the device as a power bank) has been moved to the back edge of the device, but other than that the layout is pretty much identical.
The MVP4 is slightly smaller than the previous version – measuring around three and a half inches tall compared to four – and maintains the same boxy shape except with more rounded corners at the tops and bottoms. The dotted, textured body of the MVP3 has been replaced with a smoother, cleaner finish, and the logos are now subtler, with an “MVP4” engraving on one side and the Innokin logo on the other. You can get it in black, cyan, red, blue or silver, but the buttons and the trims on the edge are always black.
Overall the layout of the Innokin MVP4 should be familiar to anybody who knows the series of vape mods, and the device is much cooler and sleeker looking than previous versions.
The Front Panel
The front panel of the MVP4 is where most of the action happens. The fire button is at the top of the front panel, square in shape and with a color-changing LED light underneath it, which indicates your general battery level with the red-amber-green system of the previous MVPs.
The OLED display is clear and easy-to-read, with your main setting shown in the center (watts for wattage mode and temperature for TC modes), some key information on the left (either the resistance and voltage in VW mode or the resistance, wattage and coil material for TC mode) and a battery icon on the right.
The two adjustment buttons are marked “+” and “−”, and they’re small and square in shape, enclosed in a recessed portion of the body. Under these, there’s a micro USB port used for recharging.
In short, if you’re comfortable with the layout of box mods, you’ll be right at home with the MVP4.
510 Connection
The 510 connection on the MVP4 is spring-loaded and the connection point is coated with 24k gold. The spring-loading means the mod can cope with some variation in the length of the 510 connectors from your atomizers, and the gold-plating substantially improves conductivity. The threading is stainless steel, so it’s about as high-quality and reliable as it could be.
Although this isn’t an issue with most atomizers, it must be said that some don’t sit flush to the top of the mod, despite the spring-loaded connection. This isn’t too bad if you screw it right down, but it’s still not ideal with every atomizer.
Overall
The Innokin iTaste MVP4 has a great design. The layout is simple – so long-term vapers will be right at home with everything – but newcomers won’t have too steep a learning curve. Aesthetically, it’s simple and stylish, looking awesome without being too in-your-face or overcrowding things with branding.
Innokin MVP4 Review – The Features
Variable Wattage
The MVP4 offers variable wattage vaping from 6 to 100 W. Compared to many other box mods on the market, this might not seem too high, but for most vapers 100W is more than enough power. If you want something more powerful than this, you’ll have to go for a dual-battery mod. However, for vapers like me who rarely exceed 60W, there is nothing to complain about here.
To change the current wattage setting, you press and hold one of the adjustment buttons until your wattage starts to flash. At this point, you can change the current setting in the usual way. It changes in 0.5W increments, but if you hold the button down it starts to scroll progressively more quickly.
Temperature Control
The MVP4 has a fully-equipped temperature control system, which supports TC vaping with nickel, stainless steel or titanium coils. You can set the temperature anywhere from 300 to 600 °F or 150 to 315 °C, which again offers a bigger range of options than most vapers are likely to need. You change from Celsius to Fahrenheit or vice-versa by scrolling past the last available setting.
The MVP4 also allows you to adjust the ramp-up wattage (i.e. the wattage the device fires at in TC mode). This is essential for getting the most out of TC vaping, because otherwise devices tend to fire at the maximum setting at this doesn’t always give the best experience. You activate this option by pressing and holding the fire button and the minus button at the same time. The only minor downside is that you can only make adjustments in 5W increments, but this won’t usually be an issue.
The only thing that’s missing from the MVP4’s TC functionality is an adjustable TCR mode. This isn’t really needed, but it enables you to tweak the TC performance to suit your build or other wire types (e.g. other grades of stainless steel) and would have made MVP4’s TC offering even better.
Power Bank Functionality
Like older versions of the MVP, the MVP4 can be used as a power bank for your other electronic devices. When you connect a USB cable to the output port, it will automatically start charging what you have connected to the other end. This does drain the battery of the mod quite substantially, but if you’re stuck without a power supply and you need your cell phone, it could become an incredibly useful feature.
Safety Features
As you’d expect from a regulated mod, there are tons of safety features built-in to the MVP4. This includes a 15-second cutoff to protect against accidental firing, overheating protection, low battery protection and short circuit protection (which kicks in for resistances below 0.07 ohms). Although you’re only likely to run into the low battery protections, these features are big confidence-builders: you know you can stay safe when you vape with them in place.
Minimum Resistance
The minimum coil resistance allowed on the MVP 4 is 0.1 ohms, regardless of which mode you’re in.
Overall
The MVP4 isn’t the most feature-packed mod on the market, but it offers everything you need to vape in wattage or TC mode, plenty of safety features and the added bonus of serving as a power bank in addition to a vape mod.
Battery Life
The battery of the MVP4 has a huge 4,500 mAh capacity. This is more than enough to get you through a day of vaping, and depending on how much you vape, it might even last you for a whole two days between charges. The LED light behind the fire button gives you the simplest display of your battery level – green is close to full, yellow/amber is a mid charge level and red means it’s time to recharge – but the icon on the main screen gives a simpler visual display of the same thing.
For new vapers, the fact that you can vape while charging with the MVP4 is a huge bonus. This means you’ll never have to go without something to vape, and even though it does slow down charging, that’s a small price to pay for never having to go without nicotine.
The MVP4 also features fast charging (at 2 amps), which you’ll need a wall adapter to get the most out of, since USB ports only charge at between 0.5 and 0.9 amps. A full charge on my USB port (without vaping during charging) took a few hours, but you can reduce this substantially using a 2 A output wall charger.
The LED light on the power supply changes from red to green during charging, and then the light switches off altogether when the mod is fully-charged.
Innokin MVP4 Review: In Use
So far, our Innokin MVP4 review has run through how the device is put together and what it can do in theory, but the big question for vapers considering picking up the device is what it can do in practice. Here, we’ll take a look at how it performs and how it stands up to the demands of everyday vaping.
Performance: VW Mode
Variable wattage mode is still how most vapers vape, and the MVP4 works excellently for the purpose. The mod works really well with a wide range of atomizers and hits hard across the recommended wattage range. The mod reportedly fires within 0.2 seconds of you pressing the button, and although I obviously can’t time this, there is no detectable delay between hitting “fire” and the vaporization starting.
I tested out the MVP4 with sub ohm and >1 ohm coils in a standard tank, RTAs and RDAs, and the performance was hard to fault across all of them. If you’re just looking for a standard variable wattage vaping experience and you aren’t looking for massive clouds and huge amounts of power, then you’ll be more than happy with what the MVP4 can do.
Performance: TC Mode
The MVP4’s TC mode is excellent. As soon as you attach the TC coil, the mod asks you if it’s a new coil, and you choose your coil’s material from there. Once you’ve set your ramp up wattage, you adjust temperatures in the same way as you change wattage in VW mode.
The TC mode is responsive, hard-hitting and offers a consistent and smooth vaping experience. As you fire, the display switches to showing the coil’s current temperature, and if you watch it you can see the temperature remains within 5 °F of your chosen setting consistently after the initial ramp-up. The performance is really hard to fault in TC mode – you’ll be more than happy with what the MVP4 can do.
Ease of Use: Changing Between Modes
Changing between TC and VW mode is pretty simple with the MVP4. The easiest way to do it is just changing your atomizer as you ordinarily would. The mod will detect that you’ve attached a new coil, and proceeds to ask you whether it’s the same coil as the one before, a TC coil (either Ni, Ti or SS) or a standard kanthal coil (which is shown as a W for wattage mode). You use the adjustment buttons and the fire button to choose an option from the ones displayed.
Alternatively, you can switch between modes by pressing and holding the fire button as well as the “+” adjustment button. If you keep them held down, the device will cycle through the different modes, with the coil material for TC modes being displayed beside the coil resistance.
Either method is very easy to use, and after a quick primer, even new vapers will have no problem with using it.
Ease of Use: Changing Settings
One minor annoyance with the MVP4 is the fact that you have to press and hold an adjustment button before you can change settings. On most devices, a single press of either adjustment button would change the setting right away. Although holding the button down first to highlight the setting first prevents accidental changes, I’m not convinced that this is a common enough issue to warrant the extra button-presses. You get used to it quickly enough, but just offering this as an option for anybody that wanted it would have been a better and less intrusive solution.
Comfort and Portability
The size of the MVP4 means it’s a comfortable fit in your hand, and it’s easy to put in a bag or pocket if you want to vape outside of the house. The rounded corners make it pretty comfortable to hold, and it’s easy to reach the fire button with a finger or thumb while you’re holding the mod. There isn’t much else to say here: Innokin’s MVP series has always been impressively portable, and as soon as the fire button moved from the large face to the edge they got much more comfortable to use.
Is the Fire Button Too Weak?
One complaint many vapers have about the MVP4 is that the fire button is a little too easy to press. Earlier devices had the opposite problem: the fire button was so sturdy that some vapers found it difficult to activate. The button on the MVP4 is definitely much easier to push, but there is very little resistance to it, and the click is pretty quiet so you don’t get much feedback when you’ve successfully activated the mod either.
Ultimately, I agree with the complaints that it’s a little too easy to push. If you’re carrying the device around, pressing the fire button three times in quick succession turns off the device, and this is a good idea to prevent accidental presses. The weakness of the button isn’t much of a problem in practice, but it could have definitely used a bit of extra resistance for transporting the device and for better tactile feedback.
Build Quality
Innokin is a well-respected manufacturer for a reason: they make solid mods and great tanks. The MVP4 is no different here. The device has a zinc alloy frame, an alloy body, a 24k gold-plated contact point, stainless steel threading and an AETHON chipset. It might not quite reproduce the nigh-indestructible feeling you got when using the older MVPs, but it’s still put together sturdily enough to give you confidence that it can take a knock or two without issues.