OBERLY Portable Blender vs iCucina Portable Bullet Side-by-Side Comparison

The OBERLY is something very different, but not in a good way. Typically, personal blenders are designed for at least a serving of beverage. This OBERLY, however,  comes a little bit short on capacity. We were very surprised when our ingredients for the protein shake almost spilled out of the blending cup. The issues, however, didn’t just stop there, things got worse still when we started blending. 

Most other blenders we tested produced drinkable shakes in around two minutes. Whereas, the OBERLY couldn’t even have its blade spin since the nuts and dried berries were too solid to churn through. For the most part, they got clogged under the blade. Right after we gave the blender rigorous shakes, it did blend, weakly and in a very short interval. A few more shaking times didn’t help much, either. Finally, we had to admit that our OBERLY couldn’t be up to this test. So we allocated zero points to it.

If you already bought it, fear not: this blender is not a bad choice if your ideal of protein shakes just involves soft ingredients.

The iCucina may be a good choice for you to prepare any protein shakes that use fresh plant-based food, but if you want to level up your workout drinks with raw nuts and dried fruits, we recommend going with other models, such as the Ninja Fit, Nutri BN401, or the NutriBullet. This blender is inefficient enough to liquify and combine such ingredients fully. 

For this test, our protein shake is designed to include oatmeal, almonds, protein powder, and dried blueberries. Throughout the blending process, we noticed that this blender didn’t have much hard time grinding the ingredients; it worked quite smoothly, indeed. All the oatmeal was turned into liquid form in approximately two minutes, which seemed not to be so fast yet acceptable enough. The final drink, unfortunately, couldn’t get the most flavor out of almonds and berries, since about a third of the fruits were still solid.

We tested the OBERLY’s smoothie-making capability by blending and combining different types of frozen fruits together, but this seemed to be an overwhelming task for this blender. Everything happening here wasn’t much different from the protein shake test, except for the fact that with our repeated interference, the blender was able to blend on its own, with huge effort and time consumption, again. 

Every personal blender in this test has a limited operating time (2 minutes). Because of that, the OBERLY is considered to have failed this test since there were a lot of unblended chunks left behind when it already hit that runtime. Time constraint is necessary since frozen foods thaw quickly at room temperature; if you don’t blend fast enough, the smoothies will come out with a diluted texture rather than an ice-cream-like one. 

Nevertheless, if you can live with the compromises on smoothie’s texture and rations, this OBERLY is actually able to process certain frozen ingredients, churning out an icy beverage that may be acceptable enough.

Berries are the favorite superfoods of many people but their skins and seeds are typically a little bit hard to be liquified entirely. That’s why our recipe for this test calls for four berry varieties; we want it to be a practical way to test for the smoothie-making capacity of our personal blenders, including this iCucina, and fortunately, it does. 

Preparing frozen fruit smoothies with the iCucina asked us to compromise on texture. This was because while this blender could break down all the fruits in one minute and fifty seconds, after such a duration, the smoothie it delivered did lose its thick, icy consistency we prefer. 

Simply put, for an ice-cold treat to come out perfectly, your blender should blend as fast as possible so the frozen ingredients don’t have time to thaw and therefore dilute the overall consistency. But as we learned from our tests, this blender isn’t capable enough in this regard. We recommend using crushed ice instead of freezing your ingredients in advance if you prefer a smoother icy blend.

The OBERLY remained an underperformer in this test. It had a hard time liquefying our greens not only because of its weak motor power but also because its blending cup is too small to tackle such an amount of food (2.5 ounces). Most of the veggies didn’t circulate and made the blade stuck even when we undocked the cup and shook it rigorously. As mediocre as this blender was in the earlier tests, this failure wasn’t a surprise anymore, we admitted.

We blended kale, spinach, and celery in the time benchmark of 20 seconds to see how well this iCucina would incorporate fibers to your meals. Eventually, we found this blender underperformed significantly against top competitors, again. There was a ton of fibrous pulp left behind when we strained the mixture through a mesh strainer. This suggested that our final drink didn’t get the greatest nutritional value. 

Perhaps, you might think it isn’t necessary to blend that quickly, blending a little bit longer is concede as long as your desired consistency can be achieved. For the most part, we agreed this is entirely possible with the iCucina.

Because of what we’ve been through with our blender, we shouldn’t expect much from it in this test. Gracefully, we did. To be fair, though, using a personal blender like this to crush ice is not a good idea; any heavy-duty task like this can take a toll on your device and impair its performance in more ordinary blends.

Typically, personal blenders aren’t designed with a focus on ice-crushing capability, and the iCucina is not an exception. The lack of strength prevented it from powering through the ice. We noticed that the blade couldn't even spin so most of the ice came out virtually untouched. Sometimes we undocked the cup and shook it on purpose to even out the blend, but this still couldn’t help much. If you particularly have a need for this sort of blend, you’d be better served by something that is packed with a higher-powered motor, such as the Ninja Nutri Pro.