4stars

Vaporesso Luxe Nano Kit Review

Vaporesso is renowned for the sleek, elegant design of their vape mods, and the company’s Luxe line is no different. Both the Luxe S and the Luxe Nano are very eye-catching, but today we’ll be focusing on the smaller version, which despite its 80W maximum power output, comes with all the bells and whistles of the flagship Luxe S, including touchscreen button with haptic feedback and an impressively complex features menu. Let’s take a closer look at the Vaporesso Luxe Nano kit:

A Look at the Contents

The Vaporesso Luxe Nano comes in a bright red cardboard box with a picture of the Luxe Nano mod and SKRR-S Mini tank on the front, and a short presentation of the setup, a list of contents, technical specifications, as well as the manufacturer’s contact information on the back.

Inside the packaging we have the assembled Luxe Nano and SKRR-S Mini setup sitting snug in a plastic holder, and underneath that we have a smaller cardboard box full of accessories. This kit contains a micro-USB cable for charging and firmware upgrading, a spare glass section for the tank, an extra coil-head (one comes pre-installed), a vape band and spare o-rings for the tank, as well as a user manual. All in all, it’s a complete vaping kit, the kind I expected to see from an experienced manufacturer like Vaporesso.

Design and Build Quality

The Luxe Nano is an advanced box mod pack full of features, but I personally believe that its compact size and sleek design are its main features. If you like the rounded box mod look with a touch of smartphone design influence, you’re probably going to love this little guy.

Measuring just 78mm x 40mm x 26mm, the Vaporesso Luxe Nano is a very pocketable vape mod, and its rounded corners and edges make it very comfortable in the hand as well. It has a zinc alloy frame, but the side panels feel like plastic to me, which isn’t exactly reassuring, considering how clumsy I can be. My main worry is that these panels will crack if I happen to accidentally drop the Luxe, but so far that hasn’t happened, so I can’t really complain.

The Luxe Nano comes in six different color options, from the classic black, to gradient blue and red, bronze and rainbow. You can check them all out on the Vaporesso website; I feel like they’re all really nice, and the choice really depends on personal taste.

Starting from the top of the device, we have a centered 510 connection with a protective stainless steel plate screwed onto the mod. The pin appears gold-plated and is spring-loaded, and the positioning of the connection allows users to screw on atomizers as large as 26mm in diameter without any overhang. That’s pretty impressive for such a compact vape mod.

On one of the narrow sides of the Luxe Nano mod, we have a large, oblong fire button that’s very easy to find either with the thumb or index finger. That’s actually the only physical button we have on this device, as all the others are touchscreen controls. On the bottom of the mod we have some venting holes, in case anything goes wrong with the built-in 2,500mAh battery.

As I mentioned above, the Luxe Nano appears to have to plastic panels, one featuring the “Just Vape” logo with an abstract pattern in the background, and the other protecting the 1.3″ color display and the tactile feedback touchscreen buttons. There is also a Luxe Nano logo that lights up whenever you press the fire button, and a micro-USB port near the bottom.

I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing touchscreen mods before, but I can say that the Vaporesso Luxe Nano is one of the better ones I’ve tested. The controls are responsive, and the vibration feedback is a nice feature as well ( you can disable it, if you like). The display is not the largest I’ve seen, but the colors are vibrant, the brightness is just right (at max level), and the layout design is bound to appeal to sci-fi enthusiasts.

All in all, the Vaporesso Luxe Nano is very well put together, which I’ve come to expect from Vaporesso mods over the years. The build quality of their products has remained high ever since I reviewed the original Vaporesso Target, four years ago.

Menu System and Navigation

This was definitely the highlight of my hands-on test with the Luxe Nano, because of how much there was to discover, and how different the navigation was due to the touchscreen controls. I wouldn’t say it’s a tough mod to figure out, but it’s definitely not suitable for beginners due to the complexity of the menu alone.

As always, five rapid clicks of the fire button turn the device on and off. After a few minutes of inactivity, the touchscreen buttons are locked, to prevent accidental pressing, and in order to unlock them you have to press the fire button three times. Luckily, the device shows you this on screen through a nice graphic. Once the lock symbol disappears from the screen, you’re ready to go.

To adjust the wattage/voltage/temperature, all you have to do is press one of the two dots on either side of the “V” logo under the screen. Every touch triggers a vibration feedback, so you know exactly when your inputs register. You can disable the haptic feedback in the menu, but instead I recommend dialling down its intensity.

Going into the vast menu of the Vaporesso Luxe Nano is as easy as pressing that V logo, aka the menu button, three times in rapid succession, while making sure that the touch controls are unlocked. Once inside the menu, you’ll see a bunch of icons, each assigned to a different mode or submenu. We have the usual wattage, voltage, temperature control and bypass modes, but also a CCW (Custom Curves Wattage) mode where you can customize the intensity of your vaping experience in 0.5-second increments.

The SP (Super Player) mode is something we’ve seen on advanced Vaporesso mods like the Polar 220W and the new Gen mod, but it’s not something I would recommend messing with unless you really know what you are doing. It basically allows you to extend the range of supported resistances, from 0.03Ω to 5Ω. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, than give it a try.

If you go through the different operating modes I mentioned above, you’ll notice that apart from adjusting the power output or temperature on the home screen, using the touchscreen buttons, there’s not a lot you can customize. For example, for wattage mode here are no preheat settings, and for temperature control there is no way to switch the supported materials (nickel, titanium and stainless steel). Well, actually there is a way to do all that and more, but you have to go into a completely different submenu called DIY.

In DIY, you can choose from three different preheat settings for wattage mode (hard, normal and soft), choose a supported material and input the TCR for temperature control, and use custom curves mode for wattage, temp. control or even voltage mode.

Finally, in the settings menu you can tinker with a bunch of secondary features, like adjusting screen brightness, locking in the resistance of your atomizer, or toggling between intriguing features like Smart and Auto modes. You can also turn off or adjust the intensity of the haptic feedback, and verify the current version of your hardware and software.

In case you were wondering, the Smart mode allows the Luxe Nano mod to adjust the power output according to the resistance of the atomizer. It’s basically a way to help people who don’t know Ohm’s Law use the device safely and without getting a dry hit. Auto Mode pretty much does the same thing, only for preheat, applying the setting it deems correct for whatever resistance it detects.

As you can see, there is plenty to tinker with in the menu of the Vaporesso Luxe Nano. It’s definitely not the simplest mod to figure out, but if you like fiddling with settings, it will definitely keep you busy.

Battery Life and Performance

Battery life is not the strong point of the Luxe Nano mod, that’s for sure. 2,500mAh is basically the equivalent of a single 18650 vape mod, and normally I would call that pretty decent, but in this case it is paired up with a tank that requires lots of power to work properly. Those beefy coil heads of the SKRR-S Mini are rated up to 80W and 90W respectively, and the Luxe Nano only does 80W, so if you plan on using it with the included tank, you’ll bee recharging this mod a lot.

One hand, I understand that in order to pull off this “nano” size, Vaporesso had to limit the size and capacity of the built-in battery, but they didn’t have to throw in this particular tank did they? They have plenty of less power hungry models, or they could have developed a special coil-head for this kit. They could have done something, that’s for sure.

The Vaporesso Luxe Nano features 2A fast charging, as well as passthrough functionality (although vaping while charging is not recommended for safety reasons), but neither is going to very helpful when you’re out and about with no battery left. And believe me, that is going to happen a lot if you plan on using it with the SKRR-S Mini tank.

In terms of performance, the most impressive thing about the Luxe Nano is the firing speed. According to the Vaporesso website, the Omni Board 4.0 chip powering this mod is capable of activating the battery in just 0.002 seconds after the fire button is pressed. That’s virtually instant, and it’s exactly what it feel like in real life. The power ramp-up is pretty impressive to, especially when using the Hard preheat setting, but then again, we’ve come to expect this type of performance from all advanced mods nowadays.

I’ve only been using the Luxe Nano in wattage mode, as that’s basically what I prefer, so I can’t talk too much about how it works in temperature control mode, but I’m sure there are reviewers out there who tested that as well. As far as raw power goes, though, this mod works as advertised; I for one have no problems to report.

The Tank

The SKRR-S Mini tank has a 3.5ml e-liquid capacity and comes with two very thirsty coil heads (a 0.15Ω QF Strip Coil, and a 0.20Ω QF Meshed Coil) both of which have a very intriguing look. The Strip coil has a slightly different typo of mesh lining the cotton and wood pulp wicking, but the thing that really attracts attention when looking at either coil is the golden central shaft, which as far as I understand is supposed to prevent juice from going up, thus preventing spitback.

The SKRR-S Mini has a top fill system, requiring you to unscrew the top cap in order to access two medium-size filling slots. It’s not the most impressive fill system I’ve ever seen, but it works. On the bottom we have three small airflow slots, which provide all the airflow you need when wide open. That’s great news for users wanting to blow big clouds of vapor, but you should know that all that airflow passing through the tank can get pretty loud.

To be perfectly honest, I didn’t notice any noticeable performance difference between the two included coil-heads. They both produce tons of vapor, and decent flavor, but they require lots of power to do so, and the Luxe Nano can barely keep up. But if you have a bigger mod available, you should try the SKRR-S Mini with that as well.

Conclusion

As the compact version of Vaporesso’s Luxe S mod, the Luxe Nano maintains the same design line and all the advanced features, but in a sleeker, more pocket-friendly package. The touchscreen controls work great, the color display is nice and bright, and the overall build quality is great for a budget mod. That said, the 2,500mAh battery capacity holds the Luxe Nano back, especially when in use with the included SKRR-S Mini tank, requiring the user to recharge the mod at least once a day. But if you plan on using it with a less power-hungry atomizer, that shouldn’t be a problem.