In 2018, not much happened in the world of waxpens. If you were a regular visitor of the waxpen subreddit in January and throughout most of the year, the Saionara was the most recommended product (and still is).
The thing is, the Saionara wasn’t without it’s controversies, nor it’s shortcomings. One of the biggest design issues with the Saionara was the design of the product. It’s big, heavy and requires a lot of energy to heat up. The Divine Crossing solved this by using an RDA-style post design, though it too has it’s shortcomings.
The Triton OS
It’s obvious that people were listening, as the Triton OS was released to varied feedback (never figured out if people liked it or not).
So, while that was an entertaining time, the product itself did little to really innovate on the waxpen formula – it still used a heavy RDA base and standard screw-in atomizers.
As you can see, there was a range of interesting atomizers, all of which were stated to be of the highest quality materials. The discussion on the Triton has basically stopped on the waxpen subreddit, mostly due to the fact it was not competitively priced. Hopefully W9Tech is working on a new design as they are one of the oldest, most experienced waxpen companies around.
The Molecule
We come to the catalyst that started the second (probably third) wave of waxpen innovation – the Molecule. This new design had not been seen anywhere, I think this cute picture by cmack1028 shows the exact difference between the “old” vs “new” design”:
The molecule did something different, they chose to reduce the size and create a new waxpen design. It uses a Stainless Steel coil held in a quartz bucket. The result is a waxpen that only uses 15-20 watts and performs like a much larger vape. It’s half the price of the Triton OS (though contains about 1/3 the parts) and is easily serviceable by the user.
We’ll be posting an official review of the Molecule soon.
RDA 2.0
What happens next is kind of history. People started trying new coils, new materials and different combinations. A few of the more prominent users began playing with RDA’s and creating their own new combinations of devices.
It seemingly happened overnight in December 2018, where Dabbercrombie posted their latest creation called the Flightdek – a Ceramic cup created as a replacement to the Quartz bucket for the Molecule.
Following this, Dabbercrombie has continued developing and experimenting with similar inserts for many vaporizers, most recently the Drop Solo RDA. Known as the Drop Kick.
So with some pretty impressive improvements over previous vape generations, we arrive to 2019. We expect this year to be a warp speed year for waxpen product development. Stay tuned.