The Smart E-Cigar that Turns Ditching Nicotine Into a Game

​There have been a few attempts at gamifying the act of quitting smoking, but it wasn't until roughly a year ago that we saw Smokio, a smart electronic cigarette sold by a company of the same name, that tracks your inhalations, your "life expectancy," and a number of other statistics associated with nicotine addiction.

Its initial products, the "900" and the "Mini", are on the market and moderately successful, the French startup says it's ready to start selling more serious vaping mods that can more closely mimic the feel of actually smoking. That, Smokio founder Steve Anavi told me, is imperative in moving people to actually quit.

"We want to ensure the conversion of real cigarettes to electronic cigarettes is really smooth—and that comes from the physical dependency of nicotine, and the psychological hit in the throat you get with cigarette-shaped devices," he said.

To recreate that mouth feel, Anavi showed me a prototype of a new smart vaping device the company is tentatively calling the "Expert." Its final design may ultimately change, but at the moment, it looks more like an e-Cigar than anything—much larger in diameter, if not length, than the 900. It's also got much, much more power than the 900.

It's stocked with a 2,000mAh rechargeable battery, compared to the 900's, well, 900 mAh battery. A battery of that size isn't totally unprecedented in the vaping world, but it is a huge step forward for this idea of making the transition from regular cigarettes to vaping as seamless as possible. A larger battery not only gives you more puffs, but, importantly, it allows you to take greater "pulls" from the "vape juice" that you're smoking.

What you call the "Expert" really doesn't really matter—at the end of the day, it's simply a much more powerful vape mod, even if it does look and feel like a stogie. The version I saw was a prototype, but it should be out for sale sometime in the next few months.

"I personally like this one better," Anavi said. "You use it more than your phone. On the average day, you use your phone 120 times, you use cigarettes 300 times a day You have to like the product that you're using if you're going to quit."

Vaping has certainly gone mainstream, and, surprisingly, there weren't too many vape ​companies at CES this year. In previous years, vaping was pretty huge, but Anavi says that it's become so mainstream that the devices aren't really treated like cutting-edge tech anymore.

"Last year there were a lot because everyone thought of them as 'gadgets,' I think now it's normal, and next year they'll be everywhere," he said.

The Smokio, however, is certainly a gadget. It's embedded with sensors that detect how many drags you're taking, when you're taking them, and that sort of thing. It even detects where you're vaping and can be set to give you an alarm if you've been vaping too much (according to a number you set) or to turn off entirely for a day after that threshold has been passed.

It uses Bluetooth to shoot that information over to a smartphone app that keeps track of that information and makes graphs about your use, all with the goal of decreasing it. You can even compete with your friends to vape less.

I asked Anavi what the end game is here, if he's selling a product that he ultimately wants people to quit. That's the thing, though: Anavi wants people to quit smoking, not quit vaping.

"Our third and last objective is to get people to decrease the nicotine in the e-liquid they're using. We want to get rid of that dependency," he said. "We know the risk with e-cigarettes is probably 0, 1, or 2. With cigarettes, it's like 100,000."