30-Second Verdict
The XMAX V3 Pro wins — 8.0 to 6.8 — and the price gap is one pound ninety-nine. That is the entire comparison in one line, and I'd like to say something more nuanced, but £1.99 doesn't buy nuance. One of these devices is beautiful and forgettable. The other is plain, slightly awkward, and still working in three years.
Auxo Calent: 6.8/10 | £78.00 XMAX V3 Pro: 8.0/10 | £79.99
Buy the Auxo Calent if: - You want the slimmest, best-looking dry herb vape under £100 — 135g, 25mm thin, genuinely jeans-pocketable - One button and four presets is the entire interface you want to learn - A loose, effortless draw matters more to you than what's at the end of it - Zirconia and sandblasted aluminium in the hand is worth a point of vapour quality to you
Buy the XMAX V3 Pro if: - You want the best vaporiser under £100 rather than the best-looking one - A removable 18650 means the device outlives its battery — £6 and thirty seconds, not an RMA - You want session and on-demand in one body, plus 1° temperature control - You'll happily learn a 7–10 second draw in exchange for real convection separation
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Auxo Calent | XMAX V3 Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Conduction + infrared assist | 100% convection |
| Heat-up | 20–30 seconds | ~15s to 180°C spec; ~30s to a usable 200°C |
| Battery | Sealed 2900mAh, ~20 sessions (~60 min) | Removable 18650, 6–8 bowls |
| Session style | Fixed 3 minutes | Session 4 or 6 min, plus on-demand to 30s |
| Temperature | 4 presets, 180–220°C | 100–220°C in 1° steps |
| Size / weight | 106 × 45 × 25mm, 135g | ~150 × 27 × 24mm |
| Warranty | 2 years | Electronic base only — no published term |
| Price | £78.00 | £79.99 |
The Hook
Everybody who has ever joined a gym in January knows the treadmill.
It is the most expensive thing on the floor and the easiest thing in the building. There's a console with a colour screen and a fan and a little cartoon track that fills in as you go. You press Programme 2, it decides the next twenty minutes for you, and you get off at the end having genuinely done something. Nobody has ever been intimidated by a treadmill. Nobody has ever needed a friend to spot them on one. And nobody, in the entire history of exercise, has come home and described a treadmill session to their partner in any detail, because there is nothing to describe. It ran. You ran. The belt did the thinking.
Then there's the rack of dumbbells in the corner, which cost the gym about as much as one motor and will outlive four of them. Cast iron, rubber, a bit chipped. They have no screen, no programme and no opinion. They will not tell you what to do next, and if your form is wrong for the first fortnight nothing on earth will stop you — you'll just get worse results and wonder why everyone else looks like they're enjoying it. Then somebody corrects your elbow position and the whole thing clicks, and after that the dumbbells do more than the treadmill ever could, for less money, forever.
The Auxo Calent is the treadmill. The XMAX V3 Pro is the dumbbells.
Both reviews already reached for their own images — the Calent is the Costa Coffee of vaporisers, and the V3 Pro is the Kalenji trainers in a room full of Nikes. Set those aside; they're each about a device in isolation. Put the two on a desk together and it becomes a gym floor argument instead: motorised convenience against dumb iron that never breaks. And I should be honest that this comparison was already written before I sat down. The Calent's own review mentions the V3 Pro seven times and recommends it in the FAQ. This is the rare pairing where one review effectively signed the other's verdict and left me to do the paperwork.
We stock both at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: XMAX V3 Pro. 8.0/10 versus 7.5/10 — a smaller gap on the card than in the mouth.
The Calent is conduction with an infrared assist, and it does the classic conduction thing very tidily. First draws at 180°C are genuinely good — the limonene lifts, the zirconia path keeps everything cool and neutral, and for two or three draws it punches above £78. Then draw four arrives, the flavour drops off a cliff, and by draw five you're extracting cannabinoids without tasting much. The infrared buys you a draw or two of extra window over pure conduction. It doesn't change the physics. Above 200°C the zirconia stops keeping up and you'll feel a dryness in the throat.
The V3 Pro is 100% convection into a small metal chamber, which produces a completely different shape: proper convection separation on the opening draws, then progressive blending as the chamber soaks up heat and starts behaving like an oven between pulls. Flavour early, density late. The catch is that it demands 7–10 second committed pulls with partial vent coverage — the review's first week was spent thinking it was a dud — and that a water pipe adapter transforms it from good to genuinely surprising.
So: the Calent gives you a better first draw with no effort at all. The V3 Pro gives you a better bowl, once you've learned the pull. The treadmill is better for the first four minutes; the dumbbells are better for the hour. That's a point of score and about four points of difference in how the evening actually goes.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
Here's where I have to be straight with you, because it affects how much weight you give the section: only one of these two devices has run the site control.
The V3 Pro went through the full Jack Herer and Wedding Cake circuit — same jars, same grinder, 0.1g on the scales, bare mouthpiece, no WPA flattery. The Calent was reviewed against Banana Kush and Noidecs T17 Red No.2 at 0.3g. Different flower, different pack size, different sessions. I'm not going to invent control numbers for a device that never saw the jars. What I can do is line the terpene families up and compare like with like, and say plainly where I can't.
The dessert side — Wedding Cake against Banana Kush. This is a fair-ish match: Wedding Cake is caryophyllene-first with limonene and myrcene behind it; Banana Kush is myrcene-limonene led with caryophyllene and linalool underneath. Both are sweet, both are forgiving, both flatter hardware. And both devices behaved exactly as their heating method predicts. The Calent opened with immediate banana sweetness at 180°C, the zirconia preserving the lighter top notes across three smooth creamy draws, then dropped off by draw four — good first hits, standard conduction fade, "recognisable, acceptable, not worth writing home about" in its review's own words. The V3 Pro on Wedding Cake got four dense draws at 180°C that didn't thin out, and its honest limit lay somewhere else entirely: it hands you warm sweet cream as one satisfying thing rather than vanilla, butter and dough as three separate ones. Rich, not resolved. Note the difference in the shape of the failure. The Calent runs out of flavour; the V3 Pro runs out of resolution. Running out of resolution is the better problem to have at eighty quid, because you're still getting something from draw eight.
The pepper-and-earth side — Noidecs T17 against Jack Herer's mid stage. This is the comparison I can only half make. The Calent's medical indica is myrcene-caryophyllene-limonene: herbal and earthy at 185°C, caryophyllene warmth at 200°C, fully extracted by 210°C, and its review's verdict was that Noidecs doesn't demand excellence from hardware — a fine strain in a fine device. The V3 Pro's mid stage on Jack shows the same terpene doing the same job, black pepper arriving on schedule and staying put, dry spice over woody haze, four consistent draws. Comparable, honestly. Both machines handle caryophyllene fine, because everything handles caryophyllene fine — it's the durable part of any flower.
What's missing is the test that matters most, and it's missing on the Calent's side. Jack Herer is terpinolene-led with fragile pine-and-lemon top notes that die in the first three seconds if a device can't hold them, and that is the site's actual exam. The V3 Pro sat it: two draws of real pine and lemon at 180°C, then the chamber's stored heat blending everything into general green herb by draw three, then good honest pepper and wood to the bottom. Eleven draws, four of them genuinely informative. Nothing in the Calent's strain test is terpinolene-dominant, so I have no equivalent number for it — and I'd rather say that than guess.
The call: on the flower they both effectively ran — sweet, myrcene-and-caryophyllene dessert-adjacent stuff — the V3 Pro keeps giving for twice as many draws, and the Calent keeps giving a prettier first two. On fragile sativa top notes, the Calent is untested by this site and I'd want to test it before recommending it to a terpinolene chaser. If you buy either device to hear every note, you've bought the wrong bracket; that conversation starts at three times this money and I've written it elsewhere. If you want a fuller sense of where each of these temperatures actually sits, the temperature guide covers it properly.
Design & Build
Winner: Auxo Calent, and it isn't close on the object. 8.0/10 versus 7.0/10.
This is the Calent's category and I'm not going to be mean about it. Sandblasted aluminium that resists fingerprints, 135g, 106mm tall, a 360° zirconia mouthpiece that rotates smoothly and clicks into its magnets like something twice the price. No rattles, no gaps. Its own review said it would score 8.5 on looks alone.
The V3 Pro, meanwhile, feels exactly like £79.99, which is what its review said and it wasn't a compliment or an apology. Plastic over an aluminium shell, tiny OLED, clicky buttons. It survived two drops — a kitchen counter onto tiles and a jacket pocket onto pavement — without drama. It is a tool that looks like a tool. Sarah's assessment of it in the review remains the best summary anyone's managed: it's the one I tell people to buy, not the one I actually use.
But two things drag the Calent's win down to a category rather than a verdict. Heater failures at three months are documented — units cycling on and off with no heat production — and Auxo's customer service has been described as considerable hassle, with two-month waits for replacements. A premium exterior over that is a betrayal rather than a feature. And the V3 Pro's build philosophy is deliberately the opposite: the mouthpiece is a £12 consumable, the screens fray after 20–30 cleaning cycles, the silicone seal will go down a drain. You're buying a Casio, not a Rolex, and the Casio is designed to be repaired by you on a Tuesday. One device is built to be admired; the other is built to be maintained. Dumbbells get chipped. They don't get returned.
Battery & Charging
Winner: XMAX V3 Pro. 8.5/10 versus 8.0/10 — and the half-point badly understates it.
On day one the Calent is genuinely good here, and it deserves credit for fixing the Celsius's worst failure. 2900mAh, roughly twenty sessions, about sixty minutes of real-world vaping, USB-C at a sensible rate. You can leave the house and come back with charge left. No anxiety.
On day one thousand it's a different device, because the cell is sealed. When degradation arrives at 18–24 months you have reduced capacity and no fix. The V3 Pro does 6–8 bowls at 185–195°C, less than that if you hammer 205°C six-minute sessions, and it drops to 4–5 bowls after a year or so of daily use — objectively worse numbers, day for day. Then you pop the magnetic base, drop in a £6 18650, and it's back to 6–7 bowls in thirty seconds. Dave's has been his daily driver for two years on exactly that basis: one battery swap, one mouthpiece, regular screens, roughly £110 all-in including the device.
That's the treadmill's motor against a rack of iron. The console is lovely right up until the day the motor goes, at which point you own a clothes horse. The Calent has the better battery. The V3 Pro has the better battery situation.
Ease of Use
A genuine draw on the card — 7.5/10 apiece — arrived at from opposite ends.
The Calent is four presets and one button. Press, wait 20–30 seconds, draw. No menus, no technique, nothing to learn. Its review passed the mum test, barely, with one asterisk: after three minutes it shuts off and she'll think it's broken, so somebody has to explain the session timer. The fixed 3-minute session is its real limitation — without the app you get 180 seconds and a restart, and the app is nearly non-functional, 2.8 stars on Google Play, with Bluetooth pairing that frequently just doesn't. Treat Pro Mode as a feature that exists on the box. There's also a grind rule the manual undersells: medium-coarse only, because fine grind clogs the chamber and kills the airflow.
The V3 Pro is three buttons, an OLED, 1° control across 100–220°C, and a triple-click to switch between session and on-demand. Simple, but not effortless — week one genuinely feels like you've bought a dud until the committed 7–10 second draw becomes automatic. Below 170°C nothing useful happens; above 210°C you're roasting. Live between 180 and 205 and it behaves.
One device asks nothing of you and gives you back exactly that. The other charges a fortnight of tuition and then does more. If the person buying is a nervous first-timer who will genuinely never watch a technique video, the Calent's case is real and I won't pretend otherwise. That is the only argument on this page the Calent comfortably wins.
Cleaning & Maintenance
A dead heat: 7.0/10 each, for entirely different reasons.
The Calent is a stainless chamber and a zirconia path — brush after each session, ISO the screens every 3–5 sessions (more often if your grind ran fine, which is the recurring theme), full vapour path every fortnight. The magnetic components want care around alcohol. It's ordinary maintenance with one grind-dependent variable bolted on.
The V3 Pro's individual parts are actually easier to clean than that — pop the max screen, pull the silicone seal, lift the ceramic cooling chamber, twenty minutes in ISO, ten minutes of active work. Never soak the magnetic cap, or you get Dave's camping weekend and a £12 replacement. What drags it to a 7.0 is frequency and running costs: screens at £5 per ten-pack every three or four months, a mouthpiece a year, a seal whenever the drain wants one. Call it £20–30 a year.
So: the Calent asks less of you and gives you nothing back. The V3 Pro asks for a standing order at the spares shop and hands you a device that never ages out. Neither is a pleasure. Both embarrass a Mighty+ cooling unit teardown, which is the only genuinely nice thing to say about either.
Portability
A draw at 8.5/10 — and the tie is the most surprising line on the whole card.
The Calent is the slimmer, prettier carry by a distance: 135g, 25mm thin, genuinely a jeans-pocket device rather than a jacket-pocket one, sandblasted finish that doesn't collect lint, and stealth high enough that it reads as a power bank to anyone not looking closely. Slimmer than a PAX Plus, lighter than an ArGo.
The V3 Pro gets to the same number by a different route: taller at 150mm but properly slim at 27mm, so it doesn't dig in, magnetic mouthpiece that has never popped off in a bag, zero noise, and one thing the Calent structurally cannot offer — the festival case. Cheap enough to lose without ruining the weekend, and a spare 18650 in a pocket means days away from a charger.
The Calent is nicer to carry. The V3 Pro is easier to take places. Those are not the same sentence, and the second one is worth more on a Friday.
Value for Money
Winner: XMAX V3 Pro, 9.5/10 against 6.5/10 — the widest gap on the card and the one that decides the match.
Three points of value for £1.99. That is the whole thing.
The V3 Pro at £79.99 is the best pound-for-pound value in portable vaping on this site: 8.0 vapour, a removable cell, dual modes, dosing capsule compatibility, USB-C pass-through. Factor in £20–30 a year of consumables and the true annual cost lands around £50–60, which is still extraordinary.
The Calent at £78.00 is cheaper by £1.99 and its own review scored it 6.5 for value, which is the harshest number on its sheet and entirely deserved. It's not cheap enough to be an impulse buy, not good enough to be a recommendation, and not distinctive enough to own a niche — except one. If "slimmest and best-looking under £100" is the actual specification you're shopping to, the Calent wins that contest outright and no score table changes it. Everyone else is buying a treadmill because the console looked nice in the showroom.
Score Comparison
| Category | Auxo Calent | XMAX V3 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7.5/10 | 8.0/10 |
| Design & Build | 8.0/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 8.0/10 | 8.5/10 |
| Ease of Use | 7.5/10 | 7.5/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 7.0/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Portability | 8.5/10 | 8.5/10 |
| Value for Money | 6.5/10 | 9.5/10 |
| Overall | 6.8/10 | 8.0/10 |
Read that honestly and it's closer than 6.8 versus 8.0 suggests: three straight draws, one category to the Calent, three to the V3 Pro. But look at the sizes. The Calent's win is a point on an object you'll stop noticing in a fortnight. The V3 Pro's biggest win is three points on the thing that determines whether you still own it in 2029. Our full scoring approach is on the methodology page if you want to see how those get weighted.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Auxo Calent if the object is the point. You want a dry herb vape that doesn't look like one — slim enough for a front jeans pocket, sandblasted aluminium, a zirconia mouthpiece that feels like flagship hardware because it is flagship material. You want four presets and one button and no technique and no forums. You're coming from joints, in which case this is a revelation and the V3 Pro comparison genuinely won't occur to you. Accept two things going in: the flavour window is three draws long, and the heater failure reports at three months are real enough that I'd buy from somewhere that handles the RMA for you.
Buy the XMAX V3 Pro if the device is the point. It's the better vaporiser on flavour, on battery economics, on flexibility and on value, for a pound ninety-nine more, and it is the answer the Calent's own review keeps pointing at. You'll spend a fortnight learning a longer, slower draw, you'll buy screens twice a year, and in return you get a machine whose only genuinely fatal failure mode costs six quid to fix.
The wrong buyer for the V3 Pro is someone who will be put off vaping entirely by a bad first week. The wrong buyer for the Calent is anyone who has read this far, because they now know the other one exists.
How I Actually Choose
I don't reach for either of these, and I should be honest about why: I own the expensive stuff, and the expensive stuff is on the desk. But the two behave completely differently in the parts of my life where they do turn up.
The V3 Pro lives in what I call the lending library — handed to mates curious about vaping, thrown in bags for festivals and camping, pulled out when something better has run flat. It has never once been the reason an evening didn't happen. Its review's line about recommending it to strangers more than I use it myself has only got truer.
The Calent has a different history. I lent it to a mate who wanted to try vaping without spending Mighty+ money. He used it for two months, said "yeah it's alright," then asked to borrow the V3 Pro instead. He never asked for the Calent back, and — this is the detail its review flagged that I still find remarkable — he never asked a single follow-up question about it either. No "how do I clean it." No "what temperature." Just nothing.
Which is roughly what happened when I dug it out of the drawer to write this. Sarah watched me set the two of them on the desk, looked at the aluminium one for a second longer than the plastic one, and said: "Oh, that. I thought we'd sold that."
We hadn't. That's sort of the review.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody in the history of gyms has stood at the dumbbell rack wishing they were on the treadmill.
The treadmill is the correct first machine. It is safe, it is obvious, it requires no supervision and no technique, and for a person who has never trained it is the difference between going and not going. The Auxo Calent is that, exactly and honourably: the prettiest, simplest, most pocketable way to stop smoking joints, with a genuinely all-day battery and a flavour window three draws wide. At £78 it is not a mistake. It's just not a choice.
The dumbbells are the machine you're still using in five years, because there is nothing in them to break and everything in them to learn. The XMAX V3 Pro is a better vaporiser than the Calent on vapour, on battery economics, on flexibility and on value, for £1.99 more — and when its battery finally dies, the fix costs six pounds and takes thirty seconds. That is why it wins 8.0 to 6.8, and why the Calent's own review kept telling you so before I did.
If you want the one that looks best in your hand, buy the Calent and enjoy it; it will not let you down for a year. If you want the one still in your hand in 2029, buy the dumbbells.
Just one more bowl.
FAQ
Auxo Calent vs XMAX V3 Pro — which should I buy? The V3 Pro, for almost everyone. It scores 8.0 against 6.8, costs £1.99 more (£79.99 vs £78.00), has a removable 18650 battery, both session and on-demand modes, and 1° temperature control instead of four presets. Buy the Calent only if the slimmest, best-looking sub-£100 device is specifically what you're paying for.
Is the Calent's vapour actually worse? On the first two or three draws, no — the zirconia path and infrared assist give it a genuinely clean, cool opening, and 7.5 is an honest score for that. From draw four it fades, because that's what conduction does. The V3 Pro's convection holds the bowl together for roughly twice as many useful draws. Better first sip; worse bowl.
Which battery lasts longer? The Calent, on day one: 2900mAh, about twenty sessions, roughly sixty minutes. The V3 Pro manages 6–8 bowls per 18650. But the Calent's cell is sealed, so at 18–24 months you're stuck with reduced capacity, and the V3 Pro's is a £6 swap that resets it entirely. Short-term: Calent. Ownership: V3 Pro, not close.
Do both have a learning curve? Only one. The Calent is press-and-draw with a single asterisk — medium-coarse grind or the chamber clogs. The V3 Pro needs committed 7–10 second pulls with partial vent coverage, and week one honestly feels like the device is broken. A fortnight later it's automatic.
Which is easier to clean? They're level at 7.0 apiece. The Calent is a normal brush-and-ISO routine with more frequent screen cleaning if your grind runs fine. The V3 Pro's parts come apart more easily but you replace them more often — £5 per ten-pack of screens every few months, a £12 mouthpiece a year. Never ISO-soak the V3 Pro's magnetic cap; it cracks.
Should I worry about the Calent's heater failures? Enough to buy it somewhere that will handle a return properly. Failures at around three months — the device cycling on and off producing no heat — are documented, not universal. It carries a two-year warranty, but Auxo's customer service has been described as considerable hassle with two-month waits for replacements. The V3 Pro's warranty covers the electronic base with no published term at all, which is worse on paper and better in practice, because there's very little in it to fail that you can't replace yourself.
Does the Calent's app work? Not really. 2.8 stars on Google Play, frequent Bluetooth pairing failures, and Pro Mode inaccessible for a lot of users. Use the four presets and treat the app as decoration.
About Dennis M.
Dennis M. has been reviewing vaporisers and vaping daily for the best part of a decade. He works in IT, has ADHD, and uses cannabis for chronic pain management. He lives in Manchester with his partner Sarah, who has now identified one device on the shelf by asking whether it had been sold.
Dennis has held a gym membership continuously since 2019 and has used the treadmill four times. He would like this noted as consistency rather than hypocrisy, and points out that the dumbbells are still there.
A note on spelling: 'vaporizer' is the de facto international spelling, but I've stuck with the British 'vaporiser' throughout this blog.
Questions, corrections, or a device you want tested? dennis@herbvape.co.uk
Related Content
Full Reviews: - Auxo Calent Review: The Costa Coffee of Vaporisers → - XMAX V3 Pro Review: The Budget King →
Head-to-Head Comparisons: - All HerbVape head-to-heads →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide → - How I score devices →
Get Either at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
Auxo Calent — £78.00 Buy the Auxo Calent → Worth grabbing with it: a four-piece grinder, because the Calent genuinely needs medium-coarse flower and a cheap grinder will strangle it.
XMAX V3 Pro — £79.99 Buy the XMAX V3 Pro → Worth grabbing with it: a water pipe adapter, a spare 18650 and a ten-pack of screens — about £30–40 for the complete kit, and the WPA is the single biggest upgrade this device takes.
Just one more bowl.
Review Policy: I buy or borrow the devices I review. HerbVape.co.uk is my employer, but my opinions are my own — they pay me to be honest, not to sell you shite. Affiliate links and discount codes exist because running a site costs money, not because they influence scores.
A note on the strain test: the XMAX V3 Pro was tested against the site control — Jack Herer and Wedding Cake, same jars, same grinder. The Auxo Calent was reviewed against Banana Kush and Noidecs T17 Red No.2. Where this comparison lines the two up, it does so by terpene family and says where it can't. No control data has been invented for the Calent.
Strains Used: Jack Herer — sativa (Haze × Northern Lights #5 × Shiva Skunk), ~20% THC, terpinolene/caryophyllene/pinene-dominant, pine-citrus-pepper profile with fragile top notes. Wedding Cake — indica-leaning hybrid (Triangle Kush × Animal Mints, via Triangle Mints #23), ~24% THC, caryophyllene/limonene/myrcene-dominant, vanilla-cream-dough dessert profile over peppery earth. Same two strains, same jars, across every vaporiser reviewed on this site — the strain is the control, the device is the variable. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Medical & Legal Disclaimer: Nothing in this review constitutes medical advice, and I am not a medical professional. Cannabis is a controlled substance in the UK; medical cannabis is legal only on prescription from a registered specialist clinic — Sapphire, Cantourage and Zerenia are three of the larger ones. HerbVape.co.uk sells vaporiser hardware only: we do not sell, prescribe, or recommend cannabis or cannabis products. Vaporisers are sold for use with legal dry herbs and legally prescribed medical cannabis. You must be 18 or over to buy one, and cannabis law varies by jurisdiction — check yours.
Last updated: 26 August 2026.