30-Second Verdict
The Smono 4 Pro wins — 7.6 to 7.5 — and it costs £24 less. But the margin is a tenth of a point, and these two don't overlap on a single thing you'd notice in the first ten minutes. One is a plastic box that vapes above its price. The other is 89 grams of milled aluminium that vapes below it. Both numbers are honest. They're different purchases wearing the same price bracket.
Smono 4 Pro: 7.6/10 | £85.00 PAX Mini 2: 7.5/10 | £109.00
Buy the Smono 4 Pro if: - You want the vapour, the battery and the control, and don't care what the case is made of - All-day use matters: 8–12 sessions per charge versus seven or eight short ones - You want degree-by-degree temperature on a screen, not four fixed modes with no readout - Three years of warranty on an eighty-five-pound device is the sort of thing you notice
Buy the PAX Mini 2 if: - It has to disappear — into a clutch bag, a shirt pocket, a closed fist - You'll genuinely enjoy owning it, and that is a legitimate reason to buy something - You want the easiest device in this bracket to hand to a beginner - Anodised aluminium and haptics matter more to you than a temperature readout
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Smono 4 Pro | PAX Mini 2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Hybrid (conduction + convection) | Pure conduction, stainless oven |
| Heat-up | ~25 seconds | ~22 seconds |
| Battery | 3000mAh sealed, 8–12 sessions | Sealed, capacity unpublished, 7–8 short sessions |
| Control | 160–220°C, degree-by-degree on OLED | Four fixed modes: 180 / 193 / 204 / 215°C |
| Chamber | ~0.25g ceramic zirconia | 0.5g stainless (0.25g with half-pack lid) |
| Weight | ~145g | 89g |
| Warranty | 3 years | 2 years, 3 with registration |
| Price | £85.00 | £109.00 |
The Hook
Ask a man why he wears the watch he wears and you get one of two answers, and they are not the same answer in different words.
The first tells you about the movement. A workhorse automatic calibre refined over decades, accurate to a few seconds a day, costing roughly what a decent pair of boots costs. The case is brushed steel and slightly too thick for a shirt cuff. Nobody has ever complimented it, and he doesn't care, because the private pleasure of owning one is knowing that most people glancing at his wrist have the sum wrong by a factor of five.
The second man just likes his. Slim, clean, nothing cluttering the dial, sits flat under a cuff, looks correct with everything he owns. Inside is a small quartz movement that does the job and nothing beyond it, and the case is thin enough that there was never room for anything else. He paid a good chunk of the price for the name and knows he did. He also gets told, roughly once a month, that it's a nice watch — more compliments than the diver has collected in its life.
The Smono 4 Pro is the diver. The PAX Mini 2 is the dress watch. Both tell the time. Only one of them was designed around telling the time.
I called the Smono the Aldi wine in its own review, and the PAX got the AirPods treatment in its. Set both aside; those were arguments about price, and this is an argument about priorities. One of these spends every penny of its budget on the mechanism and none on the case. The other did precisely the opposite, deliberately. Both were right about their own customer.
One of them scores higher. It's the diver, by a tenth. Here's why the tenth doesn't settle it.
We stock the Smono 4 Pro at HerbVape.co.uk — details and pricing below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: Smono 4 Pro. 7.5/10 versus 6.5/10, and the gap is a heating-system gap rather than a tuning one.
The 4 Pro runs hybrid heating — conduction warming the herb, convection pulling hot air through it — into a 0.25g ceramic zirconia chamber and out through a glass mouthpiece. At 180°C the split does exactly what it advertises: convection lifts the terps, conduction supplies the body, a combination pure conduction cannot produce at any price. At 195°C it peaks, four to five dense draws with real character, extraction spread evenly enough across the bowl that you never reach for a stir tool. Its review's line still stands: this is where £85 starts winning blind tests against devices costing three times as much.
The PAX is pure conduction through a stainless steel oven, and its review was blunt about the ceiling. Mode 2 (193°C) is the sweet spot — visible vapour, reasonable flavour, four draws with character — and the 3D oven screen genuinely distributes heat more evenly than the original Mini's flat one, so hot spots are rarer. Mode 1 (180°C) is a terp whisper. Mode 3 (204°C) buys density with nuance. Mode 4 (215°C) is extraction cleanup: harsh, flat, thorough. What the PAX offers instead of range is repeatability — pack, choose, draw, same result, no technique variance, no learning curve, bowl after bowl.
One note runs the other way. The 4 Pro pulls slightly harder than you'd like, noticeable rather than obstructive, while the PAX is effortless on the lips. The diver is thicker on the wrist. That's the trade for the movement.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
Here is the honest problem, flagged rather than fudged: only one of these two has run the site control. The PAX Mini 2 went through Jack Herer and Wedding Cake, same jars, same grinder, same scales as every other device here. The Smono 4 Pro's review predates that discipline — it was tested on Animal Mints and Tilray PT01 T22. I'm not going to invent control data for a device that never saw the jars, so what follows compares by terpene family, which in this particular pairing is closer than it has any right to be.
The terpinolene sativa — Jack Herer against Tilray PT01. Both are terpinolene-led with pinene behind, and terpinolene is the terpene that grasses a device up: delicate, volatile, gone the moment a hot wall gets to it first. The PAX gives Jack two proper draws and then stops. At Mode 1, pine needles and lemon peel arrive on draw one and are genuinely present — thin, but present — with the citrus lift still behind them on draw two. Draw three is handing over to green herb and draw four is warm dry herbs with the memory of citrus somewhere in the back. Four draws, two of them good, and the review counted them honestly. At Mode 2 the black pepper turns up well-defined and stays put, because pepper is the durable heart of this flower and hot walls have no trouble with it, but the bright end has gone and it isn't coming back. The 4 Pro on PT01 is the same terpene doing the opposite thing: at 170°C the floral, incense-like top of it arrives intact, which its review rightly read as much as a verdict on the zirconia's neutrality as on the heating, and then you step to 185°C and the myrcene base fills in underneath while the pinene sharpens. The PAX hands you terpinolene's opening and then withdraws it; the Smono lets you walk up the scale beside it. And the PAX review put its finger on precisely why, in a line that generalises well past Jack Herer: there is no 185°C to hide in, only Mode 1, Mode 2, and thirteen degrees of nothing between them.
The caryophyllene dessert hybrid — Wedding Cake against Animal Mints. Closer than the sativas, and this is the family where the PAX earns its keep. Wedding Cake through the Mini 2 is the device at its best and it isn't close: vanilla and sweet cream from the first draw and thick for something this small, raw dough underneath, a cherry edge on the exhale, four draws at Mode 1 with no thinning at all. At Mode 2 the butter arrives, then baked cake and warm dough, pepper coming in late and welcome. Four good draws. The catch is the one Jack already exposed and the review named it exactly: richness rather than resolution — warm sweet cream as one satisfying thing, rather than vanilla, butter and dough as three nameable ones. Animal Mints through the 4 Pro is the mirror image. The review's headline observation was three distinct layers pulled out of a single strain — mint at 175°C, cookie at 190°C, diesel at 205°C — the volatile menthol coming off first through the convection component while the conduction worked the deeper material, four draws at 190°C each slightly different from the last. The Smono separates a strain into its parts; the PAX renders it as one recognisable thing. Same terpene family, similar potency, and the difference in what came back is a heating-system difference rather than a flower one.
The call: on resolution, the 4 Pro, comfortably and for structural reasons. On body, warmth and not having to think about resolution at all, the PAX — and on dessert genetics specifically, that is not a compromise so much as the correct answer. The temperature guide explains why 175°C and "Mode 1" are not the same kind of instruction. Caveat noted and repeated: different jars, matched families. The Smono 4 Pro needs a control run before this section is anything more than directional.
Design & Build
Winner: PAX Mini 2, and it isn't remotely close. 9/10 versus 6.5/10 — the biggest single-category gap on the card in either direction.
The Mini 2 is 93 × 30.7 × 21.6mm of anodised aluminium that feels milled from one block: no visible seams from the front, rounded edges shaped for the palm, haptics that pulse when it's ready, an understated LED petal display, and colours people genuinely want — Onyx, Greenstone, Pink Crush. Its review called it the best-designed portable vaporiser I've held and I've no reason to revise that. Sarah bought the Greenstone off the website without asking me, which has never happened with any other device in this house, and remains the most complete design review anyone has written.
The 4 Pro looks like an £85 device and feels like one. The plastic housing scratches and flexes slightly — better plastic than the No.3's, less creak, still plastic — and next to aluminium it loses the instant you pick both up. What it has is the OLED: well laid out, crisp indoors, washed out on a bright afternoon. The interior materials are the argument. Ceramic zirconia chamber, glass mouthpiece, neutral vapour path. Case-back cheap, movement expensive. That is the diver's entire proposition, stated in plastic.
Both passed the Mum test for opposite reasons — she called the PAX "the little one" and held it like a lipstick, and called the Smono "the smart one" because the screen told her what it was doing.
Battery & Charging
Winner: Smono 4 Pro, by the widest margin in this comparison. 9/10 versus 5/10.
3000mAh sealed, USB-C, about ninety minutes to full, 8–12 sessions per charge at 190°C. That is more battery than devices at three times the money carry, and in practice the 4 Pro outlasts your appetite well before it outlasts its charge. No swap, which its review conceded — but at 3000mAh the swap solves a problem you don't have.
The PAX won't tell you what's in it. PAX publishes no capacity for the Mini 2, and once you've owned one you understand why: about an hour of real use, or seven to eight short sessions. This is the thin-case tax, and the refusal to print a number is part of the same design decision that produced 89 grams — there was nowhere to put a bigger cell, so there isn't one. The USB-C magnetic dock is a real upgrade on the original Mini and gets you to full in about ninety minutes, the same as the Smono, from a much smaller starting point. Motion-sensing standby helps, cooling between pulls and reheating when it detects movement, and it's clever, but the review's own line covers it: no software trick fixes physics. Heavy users charge between sessions. Everyone charges daily.
If you're out of the house for a full day with no cable in the bag, this category alone decides your purchase.
Ease of Use
A genuine draw — 8/10 apiece — and the two eights could not be less alike.
The PAX is the most intuitive portable I've used: one button, four modes, lip-sensing that fires the heater the moment it touches your mouth, motion standby for everything else. Twenty-odd seconds cold to drawing. Beginners don't know what 193°C means; they know mild, medium, strong, maximum, and the modes speak that language. The catch is the same simplicity viewed from the other side — experienced users want the number, not the adjective — and the oven's small opening makes neat loading genuinely fiddly. Use the half-pack lid always. Tom's weak-flavour complaint in the review was 0.5g crammed into a chamber that wanted 0.25g, and it solves itself the moment anyone reads the box.
The 4 Pro's eight is earned somewhere else entirely: set 190°C, get 190°C, see 190°C. Twenty-five-second heat-up, session starts automatically at target, five-minute auto-shutoff, no app, no modes, no guessing, no stirring, and a chamber small enough to make overpacking difficult. For ADHD that's the more useful kind of simple — not fewer decisions, but decisions that don't need remembering, because the screen holds the information so you don't have to.
PAX for the person who doesn't want to learn anything. Smono for the person who doesn't want to remember anything. Both entirely valid. They are different problems of attention.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Winner: PAX Mini 2, narrowly. 8/10 versus 7/10.
The 3D oven screen is the Mini 2's most underrated upgrade and the reason this category swings. It lifts out cleanly, resists buildup, and has ended the soaking-scraping-and-quiet-swearing era of the original Mini. Brush the oven and wipe every three or four sessions, ISO the screen and mouthpiece weekly, pipe cleaner through the vapour path monthly, replace the seal ring once or twice a year. The mouthpiece is flat metal — nothing in the routine is breakable, and the oven stains cosmetically while working perfectly well.
The 4 Pro's ceramic zirconia resists staining better than steel and the glass mouthpiece pops off and soaks clean, so the routine part is easy — every four or five sessions in my actual use. The mark comes off for the airpath, which isn't readily accessible, wants a pipe cleaner fortnightly and a proper disassembly monthly. Also: glass breaks. The PAX has no glass to break.
Portability
Winner: PAX Mini 2, 10/10 versus 7/10 — the only perfect score in this comparison and one of very few anywhere on the site.
Eighty-nine grams. Closed fist, clutch bag, shirt pocket, coin pocket. From any distance it reads as a small Bluetooth speaker or a sleek lighter; the flat mouthpiece doesn't protrude and the shape suggests nothing at all to anyone who doesn't already know. One of Sarah's friends thought it was a lipstick. The rest have never noticed it in her bag.
The 4 Pro at roughly 145g is slim enough for a jacket or trouser pocket without being chunky, but the glass mouthpiece adds fragility and the OLED lights up in a dark room — palm over the screen if discretion matters. It travels perfectly well. It does not disappear. That's the difference between a watch that slides under a cuff and one that catches on it.
Value for Money
Winner: Smono 4 Pro, decisively, and this is where the 0.1 comes from. 9.5/10 versus 6/10, with a £24 price gap running the same direction.
For £85 the 4 Pro gives you hybrid heating, a ceramic zirconia chamber, a glass mouthpiece, an OLED, degree-by-degree control from 160–220°C, 3000mAh, USB-C and three years of warranty. Its review called it the easiest value assessment made across thirty-eight devices, and pound for pound there is nothing sharper in the catalogue.
The PAX tax is real and its own review put a number on it: roughly thirty per cent of what you hand over, call it thirty-odd quid buying the design and the badge. It also named this exact comparison as the one that makes the tax most visible, which is an unusual concession for a review to make about its own subject and the reason the mark here isn't a hatchet job. You aren't being conned. You're buying the case knowingly, the way people buy the watch with the nice dial while knowing exactly what's ticking behind it. The review settled it in one line and I'm not going to improve on it: Sarah thinks the tax is worth it, Dave thinks it isn't, and they're both right.
Score Comparison
| Category | Smono 4 Pro | PAX Mini 2 |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7.5/10 | 6.5/10 |
| Design & Build | 6.5/10 | 9/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 9/10 | 5/10 |
| Ease of Use | 8/10 | 8/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 7/10 | 8/10 |
| Portability | 7/10 | 10/10 |
| Value for Money | 9.5/10 | 6/10 |
| Overall | 7.6/10 | 7.5/10 |
Three categories each, one draw, a tenth of a point in it. Read the shape of the columns rather than the totals: the Smono wins every category describing what the device does, the PAX wins every category describing what it's like to own. The methodology page explains why those two things get equal weight.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Smono 4 Pro if you're buying a vaporiser. That sounds like a cheap line and isn't meant as one — the 4 Pro is the better machine on vapour, battery, control, warranty and price simultaneously, and there's no category where it's embarrassed except the one you can see from across a room. It's the strongest recommendation on this site under £100 for medical patients on a budget: degree control lets you target terpene activation points, and 3000mAh removes charging anxiety from daily dosing. If you're home most of the time, if you vape all day, if you like knowing the number — it isn't close.
Buy the PAX Mini 2 if the brief is disappearance, or if you'll simply enjoy it. Its review concluded that the vapour quality is secondary to the accessibility, and for a certain buyer that isn't a criticism, it's the specification. New patients who want something that doesn't look like paraphernalia. Anyone whose vaping happens where a 145g plastic slab with a glowing screen would be a problem. Anyone who has bought Nikes instead of Sports Direct trainers and understood exactly why they did it.
The wrong buyer for the PAX is the value hunter, and its own review said so before I did. The wrong buyer for the Smono is anyone who has to hold it in a room where being seen holding it matters.
How I Actually Choose
The 4 Pro is the one I recommend to everyone and the one I reach for when I want good vapour and don't want to think — 190°C, 0.2g medium grind, the full five-minute session, four or five draws. Its review called it the vape equivalent of a reliable car with a comfortable seat and a full tank, and eight months on that's still exactly right. The Mini 2 is Sarah's: still Greenstone, still living in the clutch bag, still drawing precisely zero questions from anyone.
The fresh data point is Tom, who through a sequence of events I have stopped trying to reconstruct now owns both. I asked which he'd keep if he had to pick one. He looked at them for a genuinely long time, picked up the PAX, put it back down, and said: "Whichever one's charged." The funniest possible answer and, irritatingly, the correct one — because in Tom's flat the PAX is never charged and the Smono always is, so the decision has already been made for him by a battery he doesn't know the capacity of. (His 4 Pro is the one whose mouthpiece went loose at eight months, covered in its review; later production runs fixed the fit, and he still rates those eight months. His PAX is the one he overpacked. Tom is a consistent man.)
I don't keep a rotation percentage for either of these, because neither is a device I chase. That is the point of both. One is the watch you put on without looking. The other is the watch you put on because you looked.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody has ever been talked out of a watch by a specification sheet, and nobody should be.
The diver wins on paper and it wins here: the Smono 4 Pro is the better vaporiser — better vapour, several times the useful battery life, real temperature control, an extra year of warranty, £24 cheaper — and 7.6 against 7.5 understates it, because two of the PAX's three category wins describe how it feels rather than what it does. Asked which to buy with nothing else to go on, the answer is the Smono, every time, without a caveat.
But the PAX keeps the thing the Smono cannot buy at any price, and it deserves saying plainly: 89 grams, milled aluminium, a perfect ten for portability, a genuinely lovely Wedding Cake, and the only device in this bracket my partner bought herself, on looks, and has never once complained about. That's a real product doing a real job. It just isn't the job of making the best vapour in its price bracket, and it has never pretended otherwise.
The movement for the days. The dial for the occasions. If your budget only stretches to one — buy the diver, and accept that nobody will ever compliment it.
FAQ
Smono 4 Pro vs PAX Mini 2 — which should I buy? The Smono 4 Pro for most people: it scores higher (7.6 vs 7.5), costs £24 less (£85.00 vs £109.00), uses hybrid heating instead of pure conduction, carries far more battery, and gives you degree-by-degree temperature control instead of four fixed modes. Buy the PAX Mini 2 only if size, stealth and industrial design are the actual brief.
Is the PAX tax worth it here? Its own review put the tax at roughly thirty per cent — about thirty-odd quid of the £109 buying design and badge — and named this exact comparison as the one that makes it most visible. So: not on vapour, not on battery, not on control. It's worth it if 89 grams and anodised aluminium are things you'll enjoy every day, which is a real reason to buy something. Just not a performance one.
Which battery lasts longer? The Smono 4 Pro, by a distance: 3000mAh, 8–12 sessions per charge, about ninety minutes to full over USB-C. The PAX Mini 2 manages roughly an hour of active use, or seven to eight short sessions, and PAX declines to publish the capacity. Both are sealed, so neither offers a swap.
Which is better for a beginner? The PAX, narrowly, and on interface alone. Four modes in plain language, lip-sensing so there's no button to hold while you draw, twenty-odd seconds to ready. The Smono is just as friendly the moment someone tells you 190°C is the sweet spot — but the PAX needs nobody to tell you anything.
Can I get degree-by-degree control on the PAX Mini 2? No. Four fixed modes — 180, 193, 204 and 215°C — with no degree readout on the device, and Mode 2 is where you'll live. If you need to target a specific terpene activation temperature, for flavour or for a prescription, that's the Smono's category and it isn't close.
Did they run the same strains? No, and it's worth knowing. The PAX Mini 2 ran the site control, Jack Herer and Wedding Cake. The Smono 4 Pro's review predates it and used Animal Mints and Tilray PT01 T22. The comparison above matches terpene families — terpinolene sativa against terpinolene sativa, caryophyllene dessert hybrid against caryophyllene dessert hybrid — rather than inventing shared-jar results. Treat that section as directional until the 4 Pro runs the control.
Which is better for medical use? Different patients. The Smono 4 Pro for anyone targeting specific temperatures — its terpinolene preservation at 170°C was the standout observation of its review — and for anyone dosing several times a day without wanting to think about charging. The PAX Mini 2 for new patients who want something discrete, beginner-proof and free of paraphernalia associations, dosing gently at Mode 1 or Mode 2 where its own strain test showed the oven at its most forgiving.
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 owns the Greenstone PAX Mini 2 and has never asked a single question about convection.
Dennis owns one watch. It is thick, steel, and has never been complimented. He would like it noted that he checks the time on his phone anyway.
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: - Smono 4 Pro Review: The Aldi Wine of Vaporisers → - PAX Mini 2 Review: The AirPods of Vaporisers →
More Comparisons: - All head-to-heads →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide → - How I Test (Methodology) →
Get Them at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
Smono 4 Pro — £85.00 Buy the Smono 4 Pro → Worth grabbing with it: the Smono dosing capsule set for clean packing on the move, and a decent 4-piece grinder — the hybrid heating wants a medium grind, not dust.
PAX Mini 2 — £109.00 Not currently a live listing on the shop, so there's no product link here. If you're buying one, buy the half-pack oven lid with it — 0.25g, always, or you'll get Tom's flavour.
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 strains for this comparison: only one of these two devices has run the site control. PAX Mini 2 — Jack Herer, sativa (Haze × Northern Lights #5 × Shiva Skunk), ~20% THC, terpinolene/caryophyllene/pinene-dominant; and Wedding Cake, indica-leaning hybrid (Triangle Kush × Animal Mints, via Triangle Mints #23), ~24% THC, caryophyllene/limonene/myrcene-dominant. Smono 4 Pro — Animal Mints (caryophyllene-dominant hybrid, ~22–28% THC) and Tilray PT01 T22 (terpinolene-dominant medical sativa, ~22% THC). The side-by-side above matches terpene families rather than jars and is flagged as directional for that reason. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Medical & Legal Disclaimer: Nothing in this comparison 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.