Vaporesso XROS 5 Mini Pod Kit

The pod is empty when you get it, and you top-fill it: pull the mouthpiece off, drip your juice into the port and push it back on, no prising the pod out of the device. Inside is the Corex 2.0 mesh coil, Vaporesso's refined heating tech with a tuned mesh that heats evenly and wicks well, so the flavour comes through clean and the pod lasts a good run of refills before it tires.

It takes the full range of XROS 2ml pods, from the tighter 0.8 and 1.0ohm MTL pods to the looser 0.6 and 0.4ohm options, and because of Smart Mode the device just adapts to whichever you fit. You fill them with any nic salt to suit the coil, which is what keeps the running cost so low. When a coil finally fades you swap the pod rather than the device.

There is almost nothing to it, which is the point. Fill the pod, let it soak, and draw. The only habit worth keeping is giving a fresh pod a couple of minutes before the first proper pull, so the coil wicks and you avoid a burnt taste.

This is where a refillable earns its place. The kit is £12.99, and after that you only buy juice and the odd pod. A 10ml bottle of nic salt is a few pounds and refills a 2ml pod five times over, so your day-to-day cost drops to pennies a fill once the kit is paid for. Against a disposable every couple of days, the Mini pays for itself within a week or two and keeps saving after that.

The Corex 2.0 pod stretches it further, since one pod handles a good run of bottles before the coil needs swapping. Add the big rechargeable battery and the only thing you ever throw away is a small pod now and then, never a whole device. Per puff it is far below any prefilled or disposable option, the same case behind any refillable pod kit.

It is about as reliable as a pod kit gets, but a refillable asks slightly more than a prefilled bar. Most snags trace to a coil that has not soaked, the airflow, or a juice that does not suit the pod.

Within the XROS line the Mini is the simple one. It drops the screen and the manual wattage of the XROS 4 and XROS 5 in favour of Smart Mode, which makes it the easiest to live with but the least adjustable. If you want to tune your own watts, pick one of those; if you just want to fill and puff, the Mini is the better fit, and it actually carries a bigger battery than the standard XROS 4. All three share the same XROS pods, so pods carry over between them.

Against a disposable it is no contest on cost or waste: you buy the device once and then only pay for juice, where a bar gets binned every couple of days. It is not the kit for big sub-ohm clouds, but for a compact, dead-simple, long-lasting refillable it is one of the easiest pod kits to recommend, a clear step up from a closed system like the Elf Bar ELFX.