pen style plastic clickies, going the way of the dinosaur?

I've used the pen style plastic clickies on flashlights for a very long time, but it seems maybe a new, better breed of clickies are blossoming and will take over down the road?

The new LF5XT and the NiteCore EX10 / D10 have very interesting clickie interfaces, both of which use a micro-chip to control the light.

The tactile feel of the D10 is hundreds times better than the mechanical plastic pen style clickies of any light I have ever used. IMHO Fenix clickies were the most consistent and easy to use out of the plastic clickies, but even they are blown away by the D10 PD clickie.

Could we be seeing the end of an era of plastic pen clickies for these fancy new, solid and state of the art metallic clickies that are more durable and provide better tactile feedback? At least on the higher end lights, maybe?

Maybe for higher end lights, but the normal clickies should be around for quite a while, at least until the electronic clickies are cheaper and easier to use.

I certainly hope so, and I hope manufacturers don't limit the technology to their high$$$ models.

This river rock has a solid-state switch. Its $9 at target. I have dropped it countless times, my kids use it at night while night swimming, it has spent countless hours at the bottom of a 5 foot pool, where it gets knocked around constantly. This light is by far my most durable light, and unlike my 6P it can turn on/off while submerged. No bic-clicky here, just a GOOD solid reliable on-off-flash switch that does what its supposed to do. FWIW, it also has a decently good DC-DC driver and a LONG running Nichia emitter.

Mechanical clickies have the advantage of not drawing power when the light is "off." Electronic switches have a circuit that continuously watches to see if the switch is activated, so will run down the battery in standby mode unless there is also a separate switch like a LOTC that can truly shut everything off.

The D10 is advertised to have up to 0.4mA standby current, so even if never switched on, an Eneloop (which Silverfox found to retain 88% capacity at 3 months) will instead be down to ~50% capacity (and thus runtime) at 3 months.

Of course this is of no consequence in a rechargeable EDC light (where you may even want other power-wasting features like a "find me" locator blinkie) but may be an issue for emergency lights or shelf queens and primaries.