Why You Should Never Buy a Cigarette-Shaped E-Cigarette
Guest Post by Friske Drag.
In the early days of the e-cigarette industry, miniaturization was a large part of what allowed vaping to gain widespread acceptance. Smokers saw the advertisements for vaping devices, and in those advertisements, they saw attractive people using devices that looked almost the same as tobacco cigarettes. E-cigarettes that looked like tobacco cigarettes – vapers call them “cigalikes” today – presented unquestionably the easiest way to switch from smoking to vaping. The e-cigarette industry grew by leaps and bounds, and today there are many millions of people around the world who vape.
You can still find cigalikes in practically every gas station and convenience store. What the manufacturers of those devices don’t want you to know, though, is that the technology behind cigalikes hasn’t evolved at all in the past half-decade. Over the last several years, vaping devices have improved in reliability, convenience, ease of use and flavor – but cigalikes have remained the same. The more a vaping device looks like a real cigarette, in fact, the worse it is likely to perform.
For many people, vaping is much more than a replacement of one addiction with another addiction. It’s a hobby – something those people truly enjoy. If you really want to discover what all of the fuss is about, you must take the time to seek out a device capable of expressing all of the benefits that vaping has to offer – and you won’t find most of those benefits in an e-cigarette that looks like a tobacco cigarette.
Let’s learn more about why a cigalike isn’t the best choice for someone new to vaping.
A Cigalike Has High Long-Term Costs
Have you ever owned an inkjet printer that felt like a money pit? A good printer isn’t exactly cheap to begin with, but buying ink cartridges for a printer often feels like highway robbery. Many printers use the color ink cartridges even when you’re printing in black only. The ink cartridges aren’t interchangeable between brands, so there is no competition. Printer makers even employ lock-out technology to prevent third-party companies from selling compatible cartridges.
If you don’t enjoy the techniques that printer manufacturers use to wring money out of consumers, you should know that the business model is much the same for cigalikes. The starter kits might be cheap, but you only need to buy one of those. You’ll need to buy refill cartridges every few days as long as you own the e-cigarette – and you’ll pay a lot for the privilege. A refill cartridge for a cigalike may cost as much as $3, and it probably won’t last a full day. That’s quite a lot to spend for something that’s supposed to be cheaper than smoking.
Poor Flavor Selection
E-cigarette makers haven’t just borrowed their pricing structure from printer companies; they’ve also borrowed the business strategy by ensuring that most cigalikes are proprietary platforms that don’t work with other companies’ refill cartridges. A typical cigalike has only a handful of different flavors available, and you can’t try those flavors until you buy them. If you don’t like any of the flavors available for a given cigalike, you’ll have wasted a lot of money coming to that discovery.
Most of the vaping devices on the market don’t use disposable cartridges; they use tanks that you can fill yourself. For many who vape, a large part of the hobby’s appeal stems from the fact that there are hundreds of different e-liquid flavors in the world. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll ever get around to trying them all. Most of those flavors are only available in bottles – not in pre-filled cartridges. If you want to experience the full range of flavors the vaping hobby has to offer, you have to buy an e-cigarette with a tank. More importantly, buying a vaping device with a tank ensures that you aren’t wasting your money. If you don’t like an e-liquid, you can simply try another one. With every e-liquid flavor in the world at your disposal, you’re certain to find something that you like.
Low Satisfaction
One of the reasons why vaping technology has evolved so much since the first cigalikes appeared on the market is because cigalikes don’t do a particularly good job of satisfying the nicotine cravings of smokers. Many people buy cigalikes and find that they have trouble switching fully to vaping. Those people end up vaping part of the time and smoking the rest of the time. Every tobacco cigarette that you eliminate from your life is a major victory – but wouldn’t you rather buy a vaping device that makes it easy for you to totally discontinue your tobacco use? To make the switch easy, you need a device that generates larger vapor clouds. If your device has sufficient vapor production, you’ll have no trouble absorbing enough nicotine to keep your cravings at bay. Cigalikes simply don’t generate enough vapor to get the job done.
Poor Battery Life
The final problem with cigalikes is that, by necessity, a small vaping device will always have a small battery. To put things into perspective, a very small cigalike may have a battery capacity as low as 90 mAh. A small pen-shaped vaping device, on the other hand, will have a battery capacity of about 1,000 mAh. That’s the difference between vaping for an hour on a single battery charge or vaping all day – and many vaping devices offer far more battery life than 1,000 mAh. A typical two-battery device might have a battery capacity of around 5,000 mAh.
The difference in battery capacity between different e-cigarette models isn’t just a matter of having more time to vape on a single battery charge – it’s also a matter of affordability. When you look at the prices for cigalikes in your local convenience stores, you’ll probably find that they’re all around $15 or less. That price seems affordable on the surface, but the truth is that you’ll likely have to buy multiple kits to get a sufficient amount of battery power for all-day vaping. If having a decent number of spare batteries means that you’ll need to buy three or four cigalike kits, the price per kit becomes far less attractive.