Sup gigs 'n psuagro, glad to see y'all still around!
Haha... takes little for me to trip balls
I'm wake'n'baking on this shiz now... haha... watching "play along" videos of creepy games for Oculus Rift, haha... :
[video=youtube;gXov2qyZ-nc]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXov2qyZ-nc[/video]
I have to admit I bet that shit's a lot of fun... I'd probably get dizzy tho...
ANYWAY-- right now my vape is the portable Arizer Solo. It's pretty nice... I have some complaints but it works pretty well and has effectively replaced my DaBuddha whip-style plug in unit which just died... the solo has become my go-to unit... portability is a HUGE boon for a vaporizer... ESPECIALLY an herb vaporizer because it can take a while to get a full high through several slow hits through herb and it's really nice to have the flexibility of taking it with you or even just moving around a house OR EVEN just moving around a ROOM without the restriction of a cord.
The bowl size is a little small... and it sort of needs a stir-and-repack once through like any herb unit would generally. And if you try to pack only a little (I get pretty stingy with my bowl packs when I am almost out to make it last longer) it tends to need more herb after a hit because with the reduced mass it can't really provide a good "screen" across the surface area at that point. That's an issue with most herb-style vapes though I guess.
Let's see... it's fairly discreet I guess. Not really "hit it in the open" discreet like a pen-style oil vape, but also not "holy shit look at that guy smoking weed" obvious either... most people wouldn't guess what it was probably, especially if the glass straw part is clean.
--which brings me to another point about the bowl design, which is that it has a 'glass screen' built in (basically the bowl has a glass floor with four small holes in it) which is really nice in terms of never having to clean a screen but it lets a fair amount of plant matter through over the course of many sessions. Probably could scrape it for a killer bowl at this point, if I had a good tool to get in there around the curve. (There is a straight straw too but the suck-throughs go in my mouth with the straight straw--they get caught in the bend in the curved straw, so I don't end up with it in my mouth, which is nice.)
There are some weird quirks to it that I don't like... for instance, the weed is basically upside down and packed in with force only into the bottom of the straw. So when you set the thing down, you have to do so very gently to avoid jarring. If you jar it enough, a little (or all, if you smash it) of the weed in the bowl can fall down onto the surface of the stainless steel heating element surface and start to over-vape. (I haven't had it burn but definitely gives a nasty taste.)
It also has an auto-shutdown feature that turns it off after 12 minutes. This is good for battery life (which I will discuss in a moment) but it's sort of counter-intuitive as it seems to shut off 12 minutes after you turn it on regardless... often in the middle of a session, which requires I go through the "turn on" process again... sometimes I don't notice it turned off until I finish a draw and realize I only got a little as I had sucked all the heat out of the element, which was now off. I guess this is the best they could do since it can't detect your last hit since it's always ready and there's no 'hit button' electronically speaking.
The battery life leaves something to be desired, honestly. It's not bad, but for a heavy user it's not really satisfactory. IF one were using the solo ONLY for travel and had a nice home rig they used primarily, I think the battery life would be alright. But as my primary device, I have to charge it 2x a day. Honestly wouldn't be that big a deal if they made a nice desktop charging cradle that I could just pop it in whenever I wasn't using it like a portable phone. With just a standard a/c plug I tend to not bother getting up to plug it back in each time.
Aaaaanyway... *sativa* ... It hits pretty well if you have good breath control, like most breath-controlled vapes. Unfortunately that also means that the higher I get the worse I hit it, heh. So there's a sort of point of diminishing returns. I preferred my old heatgun setup over all breath-controlled methods, personally. (Poor man's volcano basically.)
I'm planning to step up soon, haen't decided to what yet... I want to just go to dabs but I cringe at the idea of putting my nice buds through extraction so I'll probably need something to vape my buds too... so I might spring for a volcano or something when the money's right...