The Sx mini arrived. I got mixed feelings when using it, feelings going unscathed to this day. The mod is robust, much ticker than the MVP, but the pointy bottom edges keeps poking the hollow of my big hand. It provides perfect DC power to the topper (it uses a syncronous rectifier) at very high power levels and, in my opinion, I regard this as the single most important distinguishing feature or the Sx mini, allowing to condone (albeit faintly) the rest of its inconguities.
The device has a lot of design overhead, and this is very important to me. The vast majority of e-cig mods (IPV, Cloupor, and other less regarded brands) use MOSFET transistors at the limit of their technical possibilities, and the autoctone transistors themselves are often overspecified; this leads to devices that will -sooner or later- fail with surefire certainty... well, this is not the case of Sx mini, designed with old-school parameters. A reliable piece of kit, the old western-fashioned way. Possibly, worth the 152 British Pounds (not including shipping) I paid for it.
But I keep fighting with it. This is because of the user interface. Who ever designed such twisted interface? Cannot adjust power right away.One button adjust the power envelope, the other switch between five power memories, but if you start one of the two function, the other button takes it too. Five clicks turn it off? In reality, recalls the menu system, from which you can turn the thing off by using the gravity sensor...
The charge indicator is on the main screen, which is off or power saving purposes. If you click the fire button to wake it up, you will always find the lightining symbol active, because the fire button will reactivate the charge every time. I found that if you activate the screen with the memory switch button, it will not start recharge and you will not see the lightning symbol. The Sx mini uses a proper charge algorithm, with a CV phase, so it will stand at 4.2 Volt for good twenty minutes, so the charge symbol is your only way to ascertain the end of charge; why make it so difficult to get at it?
The Sx mini has become a "case study" for all of these incongruities. It is the ONLY mod on the market to use a twelve bits ADC, which has brought the ohmeter with two digits after the comma (of outstanding precision), a battery charger and current/voltage protections of a level never seen before, a real time battery monitor, and a host of minor design features that I don't want to mention here. But why, why the interface seems designed by a team of drunk monkeys? This is what I said before; for myself - I've been a system designer for a living - and some other fellow vapers, the Sx mini has been the quiz for an entire weekend.
Initially, we propended for a form of team design gone awry. It happens that the design team chief is the one financing the all operation - and he/she has a giant ego problem to fix. In the world, Apple is such a successful company only because of their team-design ability and quality, and they put the 90% of their efforts in the interface design. Nokia made distinctly better phones than Apple, but Nokia died and Apple went to the Moon, just because of the interface. If the Sx mini only had the interface of the eLeaf iStick, it would be selling like hot cakes -but not. And is not matter of bad team efforts.
Only after having spoken with a friend who is familiar with the chinese industrial system we clarified our ideas about the 'Sx mini-Quiz'. It seems that 'cloning' for an able -and possibly successful- chinese businessman is a worse fate than eternity in the hell. This because their system prizes anything and anybody who make a monetary gain, and doesn't recognise intellectual theft. Therefore, to protect a quality piece of equipment you must include a feature or a part that cannot be otherwise sourced, or duplicated. He said that the strange menu system, intertwinned with the use of the gravity sensor, is the feature that could make the Sx mini unclonable for a good lenght of time.
Beside any explanation of the reasons, I have the best quality mod which makes me upset every time I use it. I would prize a software upgrade which make the Sx mini controllable just like the iStick, I would buy four or five of them, instead of trying to sell the one I have - without loss. Also, just in case Yihi is reading this post, please divide the number shown by the joule counter by 3600 and provide the possibility to mark start and stop it, as it would be wonderful to benchmark batteries in field use.
My congrats to Yihi for a device of quality never seen before; it needs key refinements in the user interface area. For the time being, it is an iPhone with a command-line interface.