New, innovative, stylish… Three words I had heard my friends, relatives, and work colleagues use to describe Blu Cigs so as you can probably imagine, I was looking for something special to pop out of that box. From what I can understand, these seem to be a brand of e-cigs that are great for beginners along with its vape liquid UK that comes in several different flavors. I wasn’t a beginner… I was unsure of what to expect.
It’s quite a price for quite a kit. You get a rechargeable to carry case with ‘social features’, 2 batteries, a wall charger, a USB charger, and even five spare cartridges to keep you going.
The recharging case is quite impressive admittedly, but now compare this price to similar-sized starter kits and you’ll soon see things are a bit pricier here. The same kit minus the charging case is just under $50 with Eversmoke, and again, you can get a very similar kit from Green Smoke for just over $45. Essentially you are paying the extra for that charging case and to buy that alone, it’ll only cost you roughly $10 or $35, depending on whether you’re going for the Premium version or not.
Firstly, these batteries are super cheap to replace so Blu Cigs are winning some of those value for money points back. $7.95 will get you the smaller battery, and $8.95 will get you the Premium100 battery. For the extra buck, it’s definitely worth going for the bigger one.
In my experience, you’ll get around five hours out of the bigger battery – perhaps six hours at a push. the smaller battery really only gave me three or so hours or use. Maybe I was just using it too much but honestly, it didn’t really hold enough juice for my liking, and the fact that I needed to constantly find a plug socket or USB hub just really irritated me.
I also found that after about six to eight weeks of usage, the batteries started losing their charge really fast and within the space of a week of each other, both of the batteries I got were definitely on their way out and needed replacing.
Of course, you do have the redeeming feature of the charge-on-the-go case, but the negatives outweighed the positives in this scenario and I didn’t find myself using the brand for very long.
There’s not the greatest range of flavors, to be honest, but the ones they do have aren’t all that bad. They are pretty expensive, however, and a pack of five cartridges will cost you $12.80. Of course and as always, the more you buy, the cheaper they will end up being.
One cartridge is meant to last for about a day – the same as one pack of twenty cigarettes. The reality of the matter is somewhat different and I didn’t find that these could keep up with me. I’m not a heavy smoker, by any means, but I do smoke as much as the regular ‘average’ smoker, and I found myself going through two, sometimes three cartridges per day.
There are only seven flavors available, which just doesn’t cut it in today’s competitive market, but you can make your pick from:
There are only four strengths available also – High, Medium, Low, None. There’s not an awful lot of easily accessible information on their ingredients or the mg/% of their liquid, which kind of put me off a little bit. In a world where safety matters and the rumors on e-cigs are rife, I would have thought they would have shouted about their ‘safe’ ingredients a bit more…
Their flavors aren’t bad, if not a bit wishy-washy, but I did find that the flavor didn’t last quite as long as the cartridge. I was puffing on thin air for about two hours on the first cartridge before the burning taste started. That suggests there’s not enough flavor in there.
There are no tank-style e-cigs, or liquids available on their website… They need to start catching up if they want to keep up with the likes of V2 Cigs! Even SmokeTip has jumped on the tank bandwagon so it’s about time Blu Cigs had a bit of an overhaul… Right?
There are a lot of great features about the Blu Cigs brand name and their products and although the e-cigarette itself lets the side down a little bit, you can make use of some of their rewards! You can get your hands on exclusive offers and discounts when you sign up for their newsletter, and you can also earn bonus points on your purchases which makes future purchases highly discounted. I love a good loyalty points scheme!
The ‘One Year Warranty’ is another added bonus for many people. Some brands only offer one month or ninety-day warranties so to know that you are covered for the whole year. You do need to make sure that you’ve used it ‘correctly’ though (refilling the cartridges voids the warranty), and you need to have the receipt. Plus you need to give them a couple of weeks to organize the replacement to be sent out to you and even that’s only after you’ve had a good chat with their customer services department to get an RMA sent out. And don’t get me wrong – those guys were nice but they can talk a bit… “Have you tried turning it on and off?”, “Have you tried charging it up?”… I’m sure you get the hint.
To be honest, the poor battery life was a bit of a downer for me and once I found myself constantly charging it off, I was soon put off. The flavors were great but only for a little while, and there was no way for me to upgrade to a bigger tank style e-cig. The starter kits are expensive, although the accessories and replacements are relatively cheap, all in all, I wouldn’t recommend it for those looking for something longterm. Perhaps a half decent one for beginners?
Not the best I’ve tried, put it that way, so I’ve decided to give Blu Cigs with just 2 stars out of 5. The battery is the most important part and they really haven’t got that right yet!
