Review: Minna Ola
Image courtesy of Shevibe.com
The Minna Ola looks unremarkable at first. It has no extreme curve, no extreme girth. It’s your average silicone-covered vibrator. It’s not plush. It is waterproof though, and rechargeable (although recharging this is maddening).
But as soon as you pick up the Ola, you’ll see the difference. A portion of the handle feels like an air cushion. It IS an air cushion. The Minna Ola is the vibrator for those who adore patterns and don’t need lots of vibration intensity. With Ola, you create your own pattern.
When you first turn Ola on, the power button will blink and it will give a friendly little pulse of vibration, but nothing happens. Until you squeeze that neat little air pillow on the handle. The harder you squeeze, the more powerful the vibrations become. You can slowly ease off and create undulating waves of ascending and descending vibrations or you can beat out staccato drums to the tune of your favorite Ace of Base song. This is called “freeplay mode” where you can do as you please. The trick is to play around with it at first and see what you like, then push the second button which records. This is called “loop mode”. During loop mode you can do whatever you want; once you’re done, you press that special record button again to stop recording.
I bought the Ola because I was curious about this technology. Where so many sex toy companies create variations on the same thing, this was unique and different. Except I forgot one thing: I hate patterns. I need strong, steady vibrations. I can tolerate patterns as a tease, if I’m in the mood for that, but in general I’m not. So yay….my loop consisted of nothing but me holding down the soft spot all the way to create the most powerful vibrations Ola can spit out, unrelenting, unchanging. I don’t think that was their point.
The nice part about this is that you can use it in either mode; freestyle requires that you press on the soft spot the whole time. If you let up, it stops. Loop mode means you can just enjoy the pattern you created. The Ola is long enough to be considered an internal vibrator but I don’t feel that it’s strong enough, thick enough, or have enough of a g-spot curve/swell to it to be of any real interest to me. When the Ola is surrounded (i.e. inserted) the vibrations dampen, as many vibrators do (especially the rechargeable ones) but it dampens enough so that I consider it to be on the low end of moderate. The vibrations are also somewhere in the middle of rumbly and buzzy. They’re not super deep, but they’re not irritatingly shallow, surface-only vibrations either. They can easily be described as pleasant. I feel that the Je Joue Uma’s vibrations are stronger and more pleasing to me, though, for an internal g-spot vibrator that is similar in size, shape and “luxury” level.
The only aspect of the Minna Ola that left me with any sort of strong feelings is the charging. I effing hate it. In fact, it’s safe to say that I hate ALL magnetic chargers. Seriously folks, amp up the magnetism or use the jack plug style. I have to have the Ola and the charger sitting just so, or it won’t charge. It took me awhile to realize that the power button had to slowly pulse and stay that way – and it took a number of tries to get it to do that, otherwise it blinked and then went dead without charging. It’s supposed to take 3 hours to charge it fully from dead zero but that time frame will depend upon the charger maintaining perfect contact with the Ola the whole time. The pulsing light isn’t easy to see in a very well-lit room, either.
All in all, it’s a nice looking package. It comes with the ubiquitous satin drawstring bag. Due to the power & “record” buttons being circles, they’ve kept up with the circle theme as part of their logo and design of the package. The box is a tube, the manual is a circle shape, etc. Oh and the charger? Like the We-Vibe chargers there is a wall plug that ends in a jack, and a tiny little base you plug the jack into and then it clicks onto the Ola magnetically. Lose that little base and you’re screwed. Minna actually has reason for this though, as annoying as it may be. You’ll notice a tiny jack hole in the squeeze pad; it’s not for charging. Since that squeeze pad is filled with air, when you travel sometimes altitude/pressure changes can deflate the squeeze pad. Poke around the hole with the jack (stop snickering, dammit) and it’ll re-inflate.
Downsides:
- Charger is a pain in the ass
- It’s easy to forget to turn it off if you’re using it in freestyle mode. As soon as you stop squeezing the pad, it stops vibrating. All times I tried it out, it died on me because I accidentally left it turned on.
- You can create the perfect pattern but it will go away as soon as you turn the loop mode off to take a break, or turn the power off altogether. I feel like if you went to all that trouble to create an awesome pattern, you shouldn’t have to do it again unless you wanted to.
I can only recommend the Minna Ola to people who prefer patterns, or almost like patterns if only they were slightly different. If you want something WOW for your g-spot, move on. If you need definitive vibration intensity, keep looking. It’s just all around…..moderate. Unremarkable except for the main event. The unique technology and the “luxury” trappings jack up the price though, this usually retails for around $160ish. I found this vibe on my own, but I’d recommend that you pick it up at SheVibe if you think it can work for you.
