Profile

When I first saw the retractable hand rest of this ice axe I thought why nobody made this earlier? In my opinion it's a much better design than a sliding hand rest. On ice up to 80 degrees the tool is very convenient to use, on steeper ice you have to weight your ice axe harder and your pinky quickly starts to hurt because hand rest is rather narrow compared to one of ice tool or Grivel's Easy Slider, Petzl Griprest etc, but I think it's not a big deal - anyway you'd better have an ice tool for such steep ice. The pick is made of quality steel, the spike has big opening, so in this area everything is great, although maybe it would make sense to make the pick changeable. As any other technical ice axe it performs worse in self arresting than a straight shaft axe, nothing can be done here, you have to choose.
Another design flow is using self amalgamating tape for increased friction. Again I like the idea but the implemention is poor - spike upper part and shaft has the same diameter, so all you tape is screwed after one day of snow plunging with axe.

So all in all it could be a rather good tool, BUT after 2 weeks of intense use the black plastic on the side of hand rest got broken. Although the hand rest still works it's clear this is a design flow, this part should be made of metal or at least higher quality plastic. I'll have to glue it with epoxy because no spare part is available.