Last updated: 26 August 2026.
30-Second Verdict
The PAX Mini 2 wins — 7.5 to 7.3 — and it is the dearer, worse-tasting device of the two. That sentence is most of the article. One of these puts medical-grade glass between your herb and your lips for £80.99; the other puts anodised aluminium in your palm for £109.00 and choreographs every second either side of the draw. The gap is two tenths. The price gap is £28.01, running the other way.
Nordampf Hammah: 7.3/10 | £80.99 PAX Mini 2: 7.5/10 | £109.00
Buy the Nordampf Hammah if: - You want flavour purity in a pocket — the borosilicate GlassPod is a genuine idea, not a mouthpiece with a press release - Hybrid heating matters to you: conduction base heat plus convection air movement, at 85.2 grams - You want the pod system's cleaning trick — rotate a clean pod in while the dirty one soaks - £28.01 is £28.01, and you'd rather spend it on spare pods than on a badge
Buy the PAX Mini 2 if: - You want the best-designed portable vaporiser available and you know exactly what you're paying for - Absolute smallest-in-hand matters more than absolute best-in-mouth - You want zero friction: one button, four modes, lip sensing, no manual, no decisions - You're buying for someone who has never vaped and shouldn't have to learn anything
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Nordampf Hammah | PAX Mini 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Hybrid (conduction + convection) | Pure conduction, stainless oven |
| Heat-up | ~30 seconds | ~22 seconds |
| Battery | 1600mAh sealed, 4–6 sessions, ~2h charge | Sealed, capacity unpublished, 7–8 short sessions (~1 hour), ~90min charge |
| Bowl | ~0.15–0.2g GlassPod | 0.25g with half-pack lid (0.5g full) |
| Weight / size | 85.2g / 90mm | 89g / 93 × 30.7 × 21.6mm |
| Controls | 5 presets, 180–220°C, degree adjust via double-click | 4 heat modes — 180 / 193 / 204 / 215°C, no degree readout |
| Mouthpiece | Borosilicate glass pod | Flat metal |
| Warranty | Standard Nordampf (unspecified) | 2 years, 3 with registration |
| Price | £80.99 | £109.00 |
The Hook
There are two ways to listen to music on the move, and the argument between them has run for a decade without either side conceding a point.
The first is a proper pair of wired in-ears. A copper cable, a decent seal, and — because your phone stopped having a socket six years ago — a dongle you have to remember. Nobody sees them. Nobody compliments them. What they do is put the recording in front of you with nothing added: no compression to squeeze it down a radio link, no chip deciding what you meant to hear. You hear the room the drums were in. To the people who care about that, it is the only pitch that has ever mattered.
The second is a pair of wireless buds. They live in a case. You flip it, they connect, they play. No cable, no dongle, no seal to fuss with. The sound is fine — genuinely fine, better than the arguments suggest — and emphatically not the point. The point is that the apparatus of listening has been deleted. You're just walking along with music happening.
The Nordampf Hammah is the wired in-ears. The PAX Mini 2 is the wireless buds. Both are small. Only one of them is trying to be transparent.
The Hammah's review called it a flask of tea; the Mini 2's reached for the obvious earbud comparison, and I'm leaving that one where it lives. What matters for this pairing is two pocket devices of roughly the same size with wildly different budgets — one spending its money on the path the vapour travels down, the other on the twelve seconds either side of the draw.
One of them scores higher. It's the buds. That should annoy me more than it does.
We stock the Hammah at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: Nordampf Hammah, and it's the biggest gap on the card. 7.5/10 versus 6.5/10.
The Hammah runs hybrid heating — conduction base heat plus convection air movement — through a medical-grade borosilicate GlassPod. At 190°C its review found the glass difference immediately apparent: the path adds nothing, no taste, no warmth, no contamination. At 200°C it settles into three or four draws of dense, characterful vapour, and the hybrid element does what conduction can't at this weight — extract evenly across a tiny pod without stirring. The pods themselves are a real lever: long glass adds cooling distance and noticeably smoother draws, short glass is warmer and more pocketable, steel trades purity for durability.
The PAX Mini 2 is pure conduction through a stainless steel oven with a 3D screen, and its own review is blunt about the ceiling: it will never produce the flavour clarity of a convection device. Mode 2 (193°C) is the only mode worth living in — visible vapour, reasonable flavour, four draws with character. Mode 1 (180°C) is a terp whisper. Mode 3 (204°C) buys density by spending nuance. Mode 4 (215°C) is extraction cleanup, and tastes like it.
What the PAX has instead is repeatability: bowl after bowl, identical output, no technique variance, no convection learning curve, no bad night. That is what a good pair of wireless buds sells you — not the best rendition, the same rendition, every time, with no setup. But this category asks what comes out of the mouthpiece, and one of these put lab glass in the way while the other put a flat piece of metal there. Detail: Hammah. Predictability: PAX.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
A caveat that has to come first: only one of these devices ran the site control. The PAX Mini 2 went through the standard pair — the same Jack Herer and Wedding Cake jars every device here gets. The Hammah didn't; its review ran Biscotti Mintz and Tilray Pakistan Chitral Kush T18. So this isn't the usual two lap-charts on one circuit. It's a comparison by terpene family, made where the families genuinely overlap, and I'm not going to invent a Jack Herer draw the Hammah never took.
The dough-and-cream test — where the families line up almost exactly. Wedding Cake is caryophyllene first, then limonene and myrcene: vanilla and cream over sweet raw dough, peppery earth underneath. Biscotti Mintz is caryophyllene, limonene, linalool and myrcene: minty cookie dough, sweet cream, diesel on the exhale. Near enough the same cast, and both reviews asked them the same question — how many separate things can you name in one draw? The Mini 2's answer at Mode 2 is honest and damning at once: butter, baked cake, warm dough, pepper arriving late and welcome, four good draws — rich rather than resolved, warm sweet cream as one satisfying thing rather than vanilla, butter and dough as three. The Hammah's answer at 195°C is the opposite: the Biscotti body walks in buttery and doughy with limonene brightness on top, and the layers stay distinct rather than blurring together; by 210°C the Animal Mints base has separated out again as diesel and earth. The Hammah gives you the multitrack; the PAX gives you the mixdown. Both are recognisably the song. Only one lets you hear the instruments.
The pine test — where the comparison gets unfair, and in the PAX's favour. Jack Herer is the site's hardest strain: terpinolene-led, fragile top notes, and if a device can't hold them you find out in three seconds. The Mini 2 gets shown up politely — two proper draws of pine and lemon peel at Mode 1, present but thin, then the oven takes over and the citrus doesn't return; Mode 2 gives well-defined black pepper and woody haze, four consistent draws, one blended thing rather than a sequence. And here's the line that matters most for this pairing: the presets are too coarse to argue with — there is no 185°C to hide in, only Mode 1, Mode 2, and thirteen degrees of nothing between them. The Hammah's pine data comes from a landrace, Pakistan Chitral Kush, which its review calls simpler and more direct than a modern hybrid: pinene through glass with remarkable clarity at 180°C, clean undistorted hash body at 195°C. That's an easier flower than Jack, so I'm not scoring the Hammah for beating it. What the pairing does show is structural — the Hammah has a 190°C preset with degree-by-degree adjustment underneath it, so a fragile top note has somewhere to live. The PAX has Mode 1 and Mode 2.
The call: on resolution this isn't close, and the scores agree — the Hammah takes vapour by a full point. But the honest summary is that simple, direct terpene profiles survive hot walls far better than layered ones do. Wedding Cake is the PAX at its best for exactly that reason; Jack Herer is where its 6.5 gets earned. If you want to know which temperature to chase, the temperature guide is the starting point — though on the PAX you'll be translating it into Modes, which tells you something in itself.
Design & Build
Winner: PAX Mini 2, comfortably. 9/10 versus 7.5/10, and this is where the two tenths get made.
The Mini 2 is the best-designed portable vaporiser I've held. 93 × 30.7 × 21.6mm of anodised aluminium that feels milled from a single block, no visible seams from the front, rounded so it sits in the palm as if shaped for it. Subtle haptics, an understated LED petal display, and an interaction considered in a way almost nothing else at this money manages. Its review's most damning compliment stands: Sarah bought the Greenstone without asking me, which has never happened with any other vaporiser on this site.
The Hammah is a considered object too, just a quieter one: 85.2g, 90mm, synthetic leather, stainless internals, the magnetic GlassPod system as its engineering centrepiece. The leather is genuinely distinctive in a market of aluminium and rubber — warm, comfortable through a session, more accessory than gadget, and the first thing Sarah noticed about it. The borosilicate survives a table drop, as its review documented at Jake's involuntary expense. But the pods are the exposure: Nordampf is new, and the parts ecosystem is thin enough that a spare set isn't optional.
The two reviews' beginner tests split the same way the scores do. The Hammah got a DECENT off Mum — light as nothing, but "what if I break it?" The Mini 2 got an unqualified EXCELLENT: one button, no instructions asked for, no questions, and Sarah calling it "the little one" for three weeks before she learned it had a name. That split is the whole category.
Battery & Charging
Winner: Nordampf Hammah, technically. 5.5/10 versus 5.0/10 — the two worst battery scores I've handed out to devices I'd still recommend.
The Hammah has 1600mAh, USB-C, about two hours to full, and 4–6 sessions at moderate temperatures. The 3–4.5 minute session timer preserves charge but also caps you: a moderate user gets an evening, a heavy user gets half of one, and a re-heat costs thirty seconds and the rhythm.
The Mini 2 won't even tell you what it's carrying — PAX publishes no capacity, and its review is fairly sure that's deliberate. What you get is roughly an hour of real use, or seven to eight short sessions, over a USB-C magnetic dock that refills in about ninety minutes. Motion-sensing standby is a clever mitigation — it cools when idle and reheats when it detects movement — but as the review puts it, no software trick fixes physics.
This is the one place my metaphor falls over, and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise: wired in-ears never need charging, and the Hammah very much does. Both of these ask you to think about a cable more often than a £300 vaporiser does. If your evening runs to three hours, neither is your evening device.
Ease of Use
Winner: PAX Mini 2. 8/10 versus 7/10, and in lived terms the gap is wider than the number.
The PAX is the most intuitive portable I've tested. One button, four modes, lip-sensing so the heater fires when it touches your mouth, motion standby so putting it down and picking it up is the entire interface. Fixed modes instead of a temperature range will infuriate anyone who wants 193°C on a display and gets "Mode 2" — but beginners don't know what 193°C means, and mild-medium-strong-maximum is human language. Its one real trap is loading: the oven opening is small, and Tom's overpacked half-gram in the review is the cautionary tale that section already tells. Read the lid. Use the lid.
The Hammah's five presets — 180, 190, 200, 210, 220 — are equally immediate, and magnetic pod loading is genuinely satisfying: grind, fill, clip, done. Where it drops the point is the double-click degree adjustment, which works perfectly well once you've read the manual, and nobody reads the manual. Add the 4.5 minute session cap cutting slow sippers off mid-thought, and it asks slightly more of you than the PAX ever does.
Could someone use either without being shown? The PAX, definitely — its review's first-timer test is the proof. The Hammah, mostly, provided they never want a temperature that isn't one of the five.
Cleaning & Maintenance
A genuine draw: 8/10 apiece, arrived at from opposite directions.
The Hammah's advantage is architectural. Pop the GlassPod out, soak it in ISO, wipe it — the glass is non-porous so residue never embeds, and because the pod catches nearly everything, the chamber stays clean between deep cleans. Its review's trick is the real win: own a spare set and rotate, vaping from a clean pod while the dirty one soaks. You never wait on cleaning.
The PAX's advantage is that the redesigned 3D oven screen fixed the original Mini's worst habit — the old flat screen was a resin magnet that needed soaking, scraping and quiet swearing. Brush and wipe every three or four sessions, ISO the screen weekly, pipe cleaner through the vapour path monthly, and the oven stains cosmetically without ever functioning worse. The flat metal mouthpiece has one underrated virtue in a pocket device too: no glass to break, no plastic to crack.
Two different bets, same score. The Hammah is cleaner to live with; the PAX is harder to damage.
Portability
Winner: PAX Mini 2 — by the narrowest margin here, and on a technicality I'll happily defend. 10/10 versus 9.5/10.
The Hammah is the lighter object: 85.2g against 89g, 90mm tall, synthetic leather that doesn't snag on fabric. Jacket pocket, jeans pocket, handbag, no argument — and from any distance it reads as a power bank or a small leather hip flask. Sarah's going-out jacket takes it without a visible bulge, which is the sentence that opens its review and isn't a small thing.
The PAX is 3.8 grams heavier and still wins, because portability isn't only mass. Closed fist, clutch bag, shirt pocket, coin pocket. The flat mouthpiece doesn't protrude, so there's no fragile bit to orient or protect. One of Sarah's friends thought it was a lipstick; the rest have never noticed it in her bag at all.
Two different kinds of invisible: the Hammah hides by being an accessory, the PAX hides by being furniture.
Value for Money
Winner: Nordampf Hammah, and it isn't close. 7.5/10 versus 6.0/10, with £28.01 running the same direction.
£80.99 buys hybrid heating, the medical-grade GlassPod system, the leather build, USB-C and 85.2 grams. £109.00 buys conduction, a battery nobody will quantify, and the best industrial design in the category. The Mini 2's own review puts the PAX tax at roughly thirty per cent of what you hand over — call it thirty-odd quid for the design and the badge — and it's honest enough to say so out loud rather than make you work it out.
Whether that's worth paying is genuinely personal, and I've watched it go both ways in my own house. But this is a scored category, and on pounds-per-capability the Hammah takes it: £28.01 less, 3.8 grams lighter, a full point better on extraction, and a glass path the PAX doesn't sell at any price in this shape. Every budget device has a mouthpiece. This one has a glass aroma pod.
The counter-argument is one line long and it's a good line: a device you're proud to take out gets taken out. Design is one of the seven scored categories for exactly that reason — the methodology explains how they roll up.
Score Comparison
| Category | Nordampf Hammah | PAX Mini 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7.5/10 | 6.5/10 |
| Design & Build | 7.5/10 | 9/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 5.5/10 | 5/10 |
| Ease of Use | 7/10 | 8/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 8/10 | 8/10 |
| Portability | 9.5/10 | 10/10 |
| Value for Money | 7.5/10 | 6/10 |
| Overall | 7.3/10 | 7.5/10 |
Add the seven up and they land on exactly the same number: 52.5 apiece. Three categories each, one draw, dead level on points — and the overall still separates them by two tenths in the PAX's favour. That isn't arithmetic, it's weighting, and rather than tidy it away: the PAX wins the categories you feel every time you pick it up, the Hammah wins the ones you feel when you're paying attention. Over months, a device you reach for beats a device you admire. That's the two tenths.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Nordampf Hammah if the path matters to you. You're the wired listener: you know a glass path tastes different from a steel one the way you know a good seal changes a bassline, and you're not embarrassed about caring. You want hybrid heating in a pocket device, micro-dose pods that make over-consumption structurally difficult, and cleaning that amounts to swapping a pod. Spend the £28.01 you saved on spare pods — with a new brand and a glass consumable, that's insurance, not indulgence. Go in knowing the battery is a real constraint.
Buy the PAX Mini 2 if the apparatus is the thing you want deleted. It's the right answer for a first vaporiser bought by someone hoping never to read a forum, for anyone who needs a device that fits a clutch bag and looks like it belongs there, and for medical patients who want gentle repeatable dosing without visible paraphernalia — its review is right that Mode 1 and Mode 2 with a forgiving strain are the softest landing on this site. It's also the honest answer for people who'd rather own one good-looking thing than two competent ones. That's a legitimate way to buy hardware, and pretending otherwise is how reviewers end up recommending devices nobody enjoys.
The wrong buyer for the Hammah is a heavy all-day vaper — 1600mAh and a 4.5 minute cap will have you resenting it by Thursday. The wrong buyer for the PAX is anyone who has ever said "terpene profile" out loud and meant it.
How I Actually Choose
Neither of these is my daily driver, and both of them leave the house more often than my daily driver does. That's the category.
The Hammah is the going-out vape when the going-out involves tasting things properly — dinner where the food is good, an afternoon at a mate's, anywhere I want quality without bulk. 195°C preset, roughly 0.15g in the long glass pod, full session, three or four draws. The Mini 2 goes out on a different brief entirely: Sarah's Greenstone lives in her bag and gets used most days by someone who has never once asked what's in the airpath, and when I borrow it I run Mode 2 with the half-pack lid and don't think about it again.
Tom, inevitably, is the one who made the metaphor land. He still uses wired earphones — not on principle, but because he's lost three sets of wireless ones, and the cable is the only reason pair four is still in his coat pocket. When I said one of these two vapes was the wired pair, he asked which one had the wire. Neither, Tom. That's not how metaphors work. Then he asked which he should buy, and the answer for Tom is the aluminium one with no glass in it, for reasons this entire blog supports.
The honest tally: the PAX gets picked up more, the Hammah gets enjoyed more. Both are true, and they point at different devices, which is why this comparison exists.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody who owns both a pair of wired in-ears and a pair of wireless buds thinks they own two of the same thing.
The wired pair is fidelity: the recording as it was, nothing added between source and ear, at the price of remembering a dongle. The buds are frictionlessness: the apparatus deleted, music simply happening, at the price of hearing slightly less of it. The Hammah is the wired pair — £28.01 cheaper, a full point better on vapour, and the borosilicate GlassPod is the only genuinely new idea in this comparison. Medical-grade glass between your herb and your lips, at 85.2 grams, for £80.99. That's a real thing to have built.
And it still loses by two tenths, because the PAX Mini 2 wins every category that operates before you've had a chance to have an opinion — how it looks on the table, how it feels in the hand, how little it asks of you, how completely it vanishes. Level on points across seven categories, and the tiebreak goes to the device that gets used.
Buy the Hammah if you'd notice the difference and be annoyed not to have it. Buy the PAX if the best vape is the one you actually take with you. If it were my £109 I'd buy the Hammah and put the change towards spare pods — but I'm the sort of person who kept a dongle in every coat, and the score doesn't belong to people like me. It belongs to everyone else, and everyone else is right about this.
Just one more track.
FAQ
Nordampf Hammah vs PAX Mini 2 — which should I buy? The PAX Mini 2 on score (7.5 vs 7.3) if design, simplicity and absolute pocketability are what you're buying. The Hammah if flavour and value are: £28.01 less (£80.99 vs £109.00), 3.8 grams lighter, hybrid heating rather than pure conduction, and a medical-grade glass pod in the airpath. Most people will be happier with the PAX. Flavour-first people will be happier with the Hammah, and they'll be right to be.
Does the Hammah really taste better, or is that just glass marketing? It really tastes better, and the strain notes show where: a layered caryophyllene-and-limonene hybrid stays layered through the GlassPod, while the PAX's conduction hands the same terpene family back as richness rather than resolution. The gap is a full point in Vapour Quality. Note the fair caveat — only the PAX ran the site's Jack Herer and Wedding Cake control jars, so the comparison above is by terpene family, not by jar.
Which battery lasts longer? The Hammah, barely: 1600mAh and 4–6 sessions against a sealed PAX cell of unpublished capacity good for about an hour, or seven to eight short sessions. Both are sealed, both charge over USB-C, both are the weakest score on their own card. If battery decides it for you, neither is your answer.
Are the glass pods fragile? Less than you'd think — borosilicate is lab glass, and one survived a table drop during the Hammah's review. But it's still glass and Nordampf's parts network is new, so buy a spare set with the device. Steel pods exist for pocket carry and for handing to people you don't trust.
Which is easier to clean? Level — 8/10 apiece. The Hammah wins on routine: pop the pod, soak it, rotate a clean one in, and the chamber never really gets dirty. The PAX wins on durability — the 3D oven screen lifts out cleanly and there's no glass anywhere to break.
Can I use either with a bong or water piece? Neither is designed for it — both are sealed pocket devices with fixed mouthpieces, flat metal on the PAX, magnetic glass pod on the Hammah. If water is part of your setup, this is the wrong shelf entirely.
Is the PAX tax worth £28.01 here? Genuinely personal, and both reviews decline to pretend otherwise. You're buying the best industrial design in the category, a 22-second heat-up and lip sensing. You are not buying better vapour — you're buying about a point less of it.
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 bought one of these two devices without consulting him and has never once regretted it.
Dennis owns a headphone amplifier he uses roughly four times a year and a pair of wireless buds he uses daily. He is aware of what that says about this comparison. He'd thank you not to mention it.
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: - Nordampf Hammah Review → - PAX Mini 2 Review →
More Comparisons: - All head-to-heads →
How Scoring Works: - Methodology →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide →
Get Them at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
Nordampf Hammah — £80.99 (from £85.00) Buy the Nordampf Hammah → Worth grabbing with it: a spare GlassPod set. Rotate one while the other soaks, and you're covered the day someone drops one.
PAX Mini 2 — £109.00 No product page live for the Mini 2 at the time of writing. Worth grabbing with it when there is: the half-pack oven lid, which isn't an accessory, it's a requirement.
Just one more track.
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.
Strains Used: only one of these two devices ran the site control. PAX Mini 2 — Jack Herer (sativa, Haze × Northern Lights #5 × Shiva Skunk, ~20% THC, terpinolene/caryophyllene/pinene-dominant, pine-citrus-pepper with fragile top notes) and Wedding Cake (indica-leaning hybrid, Triangle Kush × Animal Mints via Triangle Mints #23, ~24% THC, caryophyllene/limonene/myrcene-dominant, vanilla-cream-dough over peppery earth), the same two jars used across every device on this site. Nordampf Hammah — Biscotti Mintz (indica-leaning hybrid, ~25–30% THC, caryophyllene/limonene/linalool/myrcene, mint-cookie-diesel) and Tilray Pakistan Chitral Kush T18 (indica landrace, ~18% THC, myrcene-dominant with pinene, earthy hash and pine). Comparisons above are like-for-like in terpene class, not in jar. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Medical & Legal Disclaimer: Nothing here 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. 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.