E-Cigarette Overview
This site is intended for smokers who want to switch to e-cigarettes.
Before you start, bear in mind that pretty much everything these days is made in China, including e-cigs. Pretty much every e-cig battery is an '808' or a '510'. These batteries have slightly different diameters - also the 808 has a male connection (for a cartomiser, atomiser or tank with a female connection, and the 510 battery is female, for attachments with female connections - that's all the difference there is. If an 808 battery is bigger, it is called a VGO or something derivative of that name, and if it is a large 510 battery, it is called an 'EGO' or something pretty similar (Most e-cigs are made generically by Chinese factories, and 'branded up' in the west - so an 'EGO' e-cigarette from Juicy Cigs will the same as an EGO from eXhale - and any 808-battery-based kit from JACVapour will be much like the kits from Smokeless Image - the 510 batteries used by eXhale will be pretty much the same as the 510 batteries used by ROK and Vapourlites - like cornflakes, cars, and many other things - just with a different badge. (Having said this, the batteries used in Liberro's Realis is much less common, and the batteries used in the ROKstar, although compatible with 510 cartomisers, will not take tanks normally intended for other 510 batteries, because of the special configuration of the ROK battery).
All of this means that there are really only a few factors to consider: 1 Price; 2 Customer Service 3 Aesthetics (you may prefer the branding of one supplier of that of another, perhaps).
Price
This will always be a big factor of course. The Liberro pipe, for example, is exactly the same as the TECC E-Pipe, but the former is £7 cheaper (as at 14-8-2012). Given that the service from Liberro is excellent, you would, perhaps, have to find a pretty compelling reason to pay more for exactly the same product. The CE5 EGO Starter Kit from eXhale is fantastic value at £25.80 - something like half the price of competitors, and it includes some spares, and a bottle of juice. This is the best-priced performance e-cigarette on the market, bar none! Probably the best-value kit with a portable charging case (PCC) is the Liberro Realis - 6 cartomisers and a bottle of juice included, but the ROK Jet Black is hard to beat for looks (although it's more expensive and comes with only two cartomisers).
Customer Service
To be fair, I have found most UK-based e-cig suppliers to have very good customer service. Perhaps this is partly because they are all small companies that are trying to grow. They realise better than most how important it is to treat the customer well...This is good news for us, the consumers - they need to impress us!
Branding
I guess this is really a matter of personal taste. You may prefer a light, clinical feel for your e-cig branding, in which case you might go for Vapourlites, or a darker (naughty but nice?!) feel, like with eXhale.
Generally
Most 'newbies' tend to start off with a small 'lookalike' cigarette, either a disposable like the excellent BIGblue, or an e-cig with a charging case like the JAC V1P, that allows you to charge your e-cigs 'on the go'. The portable charging case (or PCC) is needed becase the batteries on these e-cigs are small and need regular re-charging, but you will have chosen a smaller battery because that means a smaller e-cig which looks more like a traditional 'analogue' cigarette. Much, but not all, of the time, these smaller cigs use a 'cartomiser' which combines a cartridge (that contains the nicotine) and a disposable atomiser which turns the nicotine into vapour. The cartomiser simply screws into the battery, and you are good to go. (The eXhale 510-t for example comes with a small tank, although it can take normal 510 cartomisers as well)
A little later, you might prefer an e-cig with a larger battery. Because the batteries are more powerful, you do not need a charging case (although with some of these larger cigs you do still get one; see, for instance the JAC XL Starter Kit, which combines a decent-sized battery with a PCC that charges two batteries at once - useful) - the battery will keep you going for at least half a day, and some much longer.
Then, you may decide that your bigger battery would go better with a 'tank'. A tank is a small chamber that attaches to the top of your battery, into which you put e-liquid. Now, with a bigger battery and more nicotine, your vaping experience is more flexible. These cigarettes, though, look less and less like traditional cigarettes, as the batteries become more powerful and the tanks get bigger. In addition, some tanks do not have an integral atomiser, and so you need an atomiser between the battery and the tank, which also adds to the overall size. However, some 'performance' e-cigs like the Juicy CIgs VV2 use 'clearomisers' or 'gigantomisers', which combine tank and atomiser into one unit.
I recommend that most new vapers start with a small lookalike e-cig - either a disposable or a PCC-based kit - that way, you can try 'vaping' with only a small outlay. If you fancy skipping a few stages, you can try something like the VV2 battery kit from JuicyCigs or the super-cheap EGO CE5 clearomise kit from eXhale. These are not only sophisticated options for seasoned vapers, but straight-forward enough for new 'vapers' to use too.
In the beginning, many small e-cigarettes were not much good, and there are still some out there that taste bad or just do not last well. I am not a big fan of Nicolites, E-Lites or Intellicig, for these reasons, and these companies make some pretty outrageous claims about how many normal cigarettes-worth their cartomisers give you. When you read the small print, you will see that the 'puff' data (how many puffs you get out of the e-cig) is based on a 2-second puff - a VERY short puff - try it. Now, obviously, the shorter the puff duration, the more puffs you will get! Why not estimate a one-puff duration, and double the claims?! To be fair to the companies I have mentioned, exagerated claims of cigs-worth are not exactly rare! Probably the most accurate claim I have found is for the BIGblue disposable, which claims 30 cigs-worth, and I reckon to get about 22 -25 -so that's not bad. For most, however, I would advocate a policy of halving the claims to get somewhere near what a real smoker in the real world might expect. All of the products on this site have been reviewed by me and tried by me, and, indeed, continue to be used by me (as I still haven't decided which one I prefer!). But - they're all good - they give the satisfaction of traditional smoking, but, of course, no carcinogens, smell, tar or carbon monixide. And practically every vaping option (unless you live on expensive disposables) is cheaper than smoking...
