Our Smok Morph 219 review takes a look at the touchscreen, dual-battery mod. Is it a worthwhile mod, or just trying to cash in on an empty gimmick?
Is it worth picking up?
While the $79.99 price tag might give you pause for thought, the Morph 219 is a solid mod that does a great job incorporating a touchscreen into an already feature-packed device.
If you’re just getting into high-end mods, the user-friendly nature of the Morph 219 makes it a great option for dipping your toe into the deeper waters. But even if you’re a veteran vaper, the excellent performance, multitude of options for customizing the performance of the device and the full feature-set should be more than enough to keep you happy.
Overall it’s a top quality mod and well worth the investment.
Full review
Touchscreen mods generally sound like a better idea than they actually are. The Ocular C from Joyetech is the perfect example of this: it was a nice idea in principle, but despite the locking feature on the screen, it was easy to unlock accidentally and then change settings while the device was in your pocket. On top of this, the near-constantly active screen meant your batteries drained unusually quickly. So it’s safe to say I’m still a little skeptical of the concept. But this Smok Morph 219 review takes a look at a new device that tries to make the idea work by limiting the amount of interaction with the screen and having both a lock and an off switch for the screen.
The question is: does it actually work?
What You Get
The Smok Morph 219 comes in a basic box, with a picture of the device on the front and some basic information about what’s included around the sides. Inside, your mod is held within a plastic upper layer, which pulls out to reveal a lower layer containing the TF Tank, with one 0.25 ohm BF-Mesh coil pre-installed and a spare in a separate compartment, a spare glass tube section (if you want a smaller tank or break the original), some spare O-rings, a protective silicone sleeve for the tank and a USB charging cable. Overall this is a great set of gear and more than enough to get you started with the device.
Smok Morph 219 Review – The Design
Appearance
The Morph takes after the Alien 220 a little bit when it comes to the overall look, with two slanted rectangular faces on the front and back, one of which is for the touchscreen and the other with a multi-colored resin section that adds some visual flair.
The Smok logo sits above the touchscreen and the Morph logo above the resin, but other than that there isn’t any visible branding on the device, and it really is quite minimal. My device is the metallic rainbow effect version, which looks great and matches the detail on the top and bottom of the tank. The tank sits centrally on the top of the mod, rather than off to the front edge as it is on many devices, and this helps the whole thing look neat and cohesive. Purely on aesthetics, the Morph looks really cool.
The Touchscreen
The touchscreen is the major selling point of the Morph, and it’s 1.9 inches of full-color HD. The home page is well laid out, with your main setting shown in a ring in the middle of the screen, and left and right adjustment buttons below it. On the lower section, there are four small sections showing the resistance of your coil, a puff counter, the voltage it’s firing at and the current draw. Finally, right at the bottom there’s an indicator to show the remaining life in each of your batteries separately. There’s a lock icon in the top right hand corner, which works alongside the button above the firing bar to stop you from accidentally changing any settings. Finally, there’s a menu button in the top left that you tap to change modes or make more detailed adjustments on the device.
Battery Compartment
The battery compartment on the Morph is accessed through the bottom, with a little catch you move to open it. The individual compartments are separated from each other, and both are clearly labeled both on the base and up inside the tubes too, so you can easily see the orientation for each battery. The catch works well too, it keeps it all locked securely enough that you don’t have to worry about accidentally popping it open. You do have to push it quite firmly to get it closed, but everything is secure and well designed.
The TF Tank and Coils
The TF Tank included with the kit is basically the same as the modern TFV tanks from Smok, with a hinged top-filling system, a 6 ml capacity tank that bulges out in the middle and two airflow slots around the base. The coil connection is a little different though – there’s a frame section in the center of the tank, which the atomizer head pushes into without any screwing or unscrewing needed. The base of the atomizer heads is also flat, and they fit snugly into the base of the tank, which screws into the rest of the body. The top-filling system is like the more recent versions, where there’s a small button to control the hinge mechanism so it doesn’t accidentally spill out when you’re carrying the tank around. Overall the tank is really well designed, albeit quite similar to the recent TFV series tanks.
The coils are mesh, which is the go-to material these days because the large surface area really boosts both vapor production and flavor, as well as offering even heating over a large portion of your wick.
Firing Bar and Secondary Key
The Morph uses a firing bar for its main operation, very much like the Alien series and essentially the same in terms of general design too. It occupies the left hand side of the mod, when you look at it from the screen side, and there’s a small rectangular “secondary key” above it, which is used to activate and deactivate the screen, as well as locking it. The secondary key is quite small, but you only rarely need to use it and this doesn’t cause an issue in practice.
Overall
The Morph 219 has an excellent design, overall. It’s very much like an improved version of the Alien 220, with some extra visual flair and minor improvements to things like the positioning of the 510 connection and the hinge on the battery door.
Smok Morph 219 Review – Features
Variable Wattage Up to 219 W
The Morph 219 offers variable wattage vaping up to an impressive 219 W, which is realistically more than you’re likely to need under pretty much any circumstances. Why they didn’t go up to 220 W is a mystery for the ages – maybe to try to avoid the inevitable comparisons with the Alien 220 – but for all intents and purposes it doesn’t really matter.
You can only increase the wattage in 1 W increments, which might not be ideal if you’re very particular about your settings, but for me (and I dare say most vapers) that only vape at whole watt settings anyway, this merely makes scrolling an easier process. This helps with the touchscreen too, because each tap has a much more meaningful effect on your actual setting than if it only changed by 0.1 or 0.5 W each time. This was a big issue with Joyetech’s Ocular C.
The device also fires within a thousandth of a second after you pressing the bar, too, so there is no noticeable delay at all. It will fire any coil down to 0.1 ohms in resistance. There is also the standard Smok “hit strength” feature, which allows you to increase or decrease the output at the beginning of your draw if you want a harder or softer hit.
Temperature Control with Ni, SS and Ti Coils
There is also a full-featured temperature control suite included on the Morph 219. This works with all common TC coil materials on the market – nickel, stainless steel and titanium – and each mode has adjustable TCR so you can adjust the responsiveness to suit your preferences or different grades of stainless steel.
You can set the temperature anywhere in the usual range of between 200 and 600 °F / 100 to 315 °C, and it works with coils down to 0.05 ohms in resistance. When you select the mode, you also get the option to input your ramp-up wattage, which is a crucial feature for getting TC to work the way you want it to.
Menu System
The touchscreen of the Morph really comes into its own when you’re navigating the menu system. It removes all the awkward button-press combinations or miss-steps you find with other devices. After unlocking the screen, you press the Windows-like symbol in the top left to be taken to the menu, and then you’re presented with a simple four-item menu: Mode, My Mode, Puff and Settings. Mode lets you select the current mode – either VW or a TC mode – My Mode lets you create up to four profiles for your common settings (which you can tie to certain nicotine strengths and flavors for clarity), Puff controls the puff counter, and Settings includes things like the theme color, information about the chipset, the option to factory reset the device and the option passcode for accessing the device.
Of course, the menu is really easy to navigate – you just tap what you want, and use the back arrow to go back up a level. There’s also a little “home” button in the top left of the main screen if you want to be taken back to the main screen. Overall, you can’t really go wrong with the menu system even if you don’t even glance at the manual.
Safety Features
It should go without saying that the device comes with the standard selection of safety features you’d expect from any mod, including reverse polarity protection for your batteries, low battery protection, a 10-second puff cutoff, overheating protection and automatically recognizing when you change your atomizer.
Smok Morph 219 Review – In Use
Performance – VW Mode
The variable wattage mode on the Smok Morph 219 works just as you’d want it to, and performs well throughout the included wattage range. The ridiculously short response time means you never notice a lag between pressing the fire bar and getting vapor. It works really well in combination with the mesh coils included with the TF Tank in the kit, producing plenty of vapor and allowing the flavor of your juice to come through clearly and strongly. Overall it works perfectly in VW mode; I have no complaints at all!
Performance – TC Mode
TC mode on the Morph is also hard to fault. With all of the ability to customize the performance you get by adjusting the ramp-up wattage and changing the TCR, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that most vapers will be happy with the performance. The device stays close to your chosen temperature after hitting the limit, so you don’t notice any big drop-offs in output at any point in your draw. Overall it works great in both modes.
Ease of Use
The touchscreen nature of the Smok Morph 219 makes it really user-friendly. The only hiccup I had prior to reading the menu was working out what to do with the secondary button – or, to translate my embarrassing few minutes, being able to actually unlock the touchscreen. But from that point onwards, it was an absolute breeze to do anything I wanted to with the device.
The TF tank is also about as straightforward as you can get with a sub ohm tank. The top filling system works really well – press the button, move the top cap off to the side and then fill up through the big hole. Changing coils just requires unscrewing the base of the tank, pulling the old one out and pushing the new one into its place. If you’ve ever used a tank before, you won’t have an issue, and if you haven’t you’ll pick it up pretty quickly anyway.
Battery Life and the Touchscreen
The touchscreen would be expected to put a bit of a bigger drain on your battery life than a standard device, and while this is broadly true, the difference is really minimal. The fact is that once you’ve fiddled with your settings and got everything working like you want it to, you rarely need to even switch the screen on. This is a massive improvement over devices like the Ocular C from Joyetech, which has the screen automatically switch on after you take a puff. Whether you think the touchscreen is worthwhile overall is a bit more of an open question, but from my perspective it wasn’t particularly detrimental in terms of battery life.
Comfort and Portability
The Morph 219 is a dual-battery mod, and sometimes these can be pretty bulky and so less-than-ideal when it comes to taking the device out and about with you. However, the overt similarity to the Smok Alien 220 is really a strength in this department. It’s certainly bigger than single-battery mods, but still notably smaller than most dual-battery mods on the market. It fits comfortably in your hand, and the squeeze-to-fire operation makes it really comfortable to use too.
In terms of portability, it obviously can’t compete with pod devices or many newer-generation low-power offerings, but when you’re picking up a dual-battery box mod capable of putting out over 200 W, you should really be expecting this. And that said, it’s still small enough to fit in a pocket or a bag, so it shouldn’t cause many issues in practice.
Build Quality
Like most devices from Smok, the Morph 219 is really well put together. The mod feels really sturdy, it uses high-quality materials throughout and the buttons, battery compartment and threading work just as you want them to. The touchscreen is also responsive and hasn’t caused me any issues in practice.