With the success of their Mini Volt 40W mod it looks like COV is getting into the mod game pretty hard. The Trident is their second offering and this time it’s a 60W device with an interchangeable 18650 battery and many chipset features you would expect from a higher end mod.
At first glance, it’s a rather polarizing aesthetic, you will have a lot of love or not, for it. The size and hand feel are right on the money, comparable to an IPV D2/3. Weight is good too. For us, the two tone look isn’t our thing, we don’t really dig the indented shapes on the sides much either (they don’t seem necessary). The Gun Metal colour way COV sent us is some of the nicest paint finish we have seen on a mod, and it seems to be holding up very well with no signs of use thus far. We dig the almost purple accents coming out of the paint. Branding is also pretty tasteful with just 2 placements (side & back). It has the feel and look of an expensive mod, but then their are also attributes that make it feel the opposite. It’s balancing on a fine line that sways more to the inexpensive side.
The sliding battery door while innovative and easy to use, has issues with a bit of shift and rattle when holding or picking it up. It effects the hand feel greatly, you find yourself worrying about how secure the door/sleeve is, although we have had no issues with it at all.
The Screen is one of the Tridents’ standout features, it’s bright, crisp and a real pleasure to use. It’s driven by a chipset that is pretty much a clone of the Yihi SX series chips. You get all the features, 5 memory settings, 3 ramp up settings, the exact same style of displaying your settings, and the exact same button sequences for controlling all the features. It’s cloned really well, feels accurate and powerful. This chipset gives the mod some pretty high end features you wouldn’t expect in this price range.
Battery life is a bit of a concern with most single 18650 mods, especially when vaping above 45W. But we have to point out that this chip has been set very conservatively, the minimum battery charge is set to 3.48V or there abouts and once it hits this range you need to change your battery. Most batteries can handle a discharge to 3.2V, so basically you lose about 25-30% of your battery life because this setting is too high. It equates to a lot, for example, if we vape a 0.25 Ohm atty at 52W and get about 3hrs of solid vaping, you would get 1 more hour of vaping. To us that’s a big deal.
The top of the mod is an interesting design, rubber coated magnesium alloy that seems to be very durable. But there is a concave section surrounding the 510 that makes throwing on an atty challenging at times. You need to hit the 510 perfectly straight/vertical or you will have trouble getting your atty to connect. Even after extended use, we just had trouble connecting a high quality RDA to the mod as we wrote this review. We could see this becoming an ever growing pain point as time went on.
It’s a decent mod, and we have to give props to COV for being original with their design thinking and execution. But it’s a little pricey for how it feels and with a clone chip of unknown origin. $65 feels steep, it sort of sits in a price range void between beginner and much more powerful and feature rich mods. The 60W is a little bit low too, many single battery mods now feature 75W at a minimum and with all the ceramic and clapton craze sometimes you need to get up there with the watts. We think if this was in the $40 range it would be an awesome choice.
COV is keeping busy and they have some great new tanks and another mod coming soon! Check out their instagram for a teaser. The new mod looks to have an organic shape to it, and it’s going to be 200W. Here’s hoping for a DNA 200 Chipset!
Thanks for the review, i decided to go and buy one over at vapenology because the price was reasonable. It arrived within 3 days and its just as you say.. love this device its such a beast 😀