iKago Smart Mug Warmer Review
Tepid coffee and tea are utterly dispiriting, and the effort involved in rectifying this isn't worth it—until the iKago Smart Mug Warmer showed up on our desk, a product that expels such joyless drinking by never letting your drink go cold.
Design
The iKago Smart Mug's hot plate is both sleek and remarkably easy to use. Just think of it as your coaster that also happens to have a built-in heater. It’s very suited to desks due to its minimised footprint and the fact it requires a power source, making it less suitable for coffee tables or other locations without convenient access to power. Worth also pointing our that as its a hot plate, it does get very hot, so keep it away from where you’re pacing about with your mouse in hand!
The onboard display can denote either Celsius or Fahrenheit, with the top portion of the display indicating the actual temperature of the drink and the bottom number displaying the target temperature. Operationally its very straightforward, a user can set the desired temperature in 1-degree increments between 40-80°C via touch-sensitive buttons with positive and minus symbols located above the display.
Compatibility
Despite iKago bundling a 430ml (15oz) mug with this product, which might suggest proprietary usage, this is not the case. The iKago system has broader appeal because it works with most ceramic mugs. In our testing, it has been absolutely fine with all our mugs of varying shapes and sizes. The supplied iKago-branded black mug is of nice quality and comes with an optional lid. As expected, this mug features a base ideally suited for the iKago warming area. Notably, even mugs with an extended circumference ring, where the base is slightly elevated, still work just fine though.
Performance
65°C is the general sweet spot for the kind of barista beverages we make with our Sage Barista Express Impress coffee machine. Having a flat white or larger latte-style drink remain the same temperature to the last drop is rather pleasurable and initially surprising, as the brain anticipates a lower quantity of drink to correspond with a cooler temperature. We can confidently state that the concept of the product absolutely works, without any variation in temperature from sip to sip.
But what about if you happen to mislay your mug and your drink goes tepid, well it’s rather surprising to see just how quickly the iKago can heat it back up again. To take a drink that has been half consumed at around 100ml remaining and cooled down to just under 20°C back up to the desired temperature of 65°C takes around 3-7 minutes. A little stir helps to even the heat distribution within the supplied iKago mug. Of course, using your own mugs, which we also did, will produce different results depending on the volume of liquid they hold and the style of the mug.
Verdict
The iKago Smart Mug Warmer ends the joylessness of tepid coffee and tea, enabling your hot drink of choice to remain (or become warmer if you’d like) at the temperature it was served until the last drop. It’s very pleasant indeed and quickly becomes an unassuming normality. If the nice mug supplied were proprietary, we’d be less enthused about this proposition. However, because the hot plate coaster is compatible with a wide range of ceramic mugs (in all our various shapes and sizes), is quick at reheating if a mug gets misplaced, and precisely shows the temperature and target via a display, it all makes it a dependable desk buddy, especially on winter days.