30-Second Verdict
The Smono No.3 wins — 7.5 to 7.2 — and it costs £24 less. The No.5 is the better-equipped device by a distance: colour OLED, Smart Puff draw detection, a removable 18650 that makes charging anxiety somebody else's problem. It still loses, because the No.3 does the one thing you bought a vaporiser for — turning flower into flavour — noticeably better, and does it for seventy-five quid.
Smono No.5: 7.2/10 | £99.00 Smono No.3: 7.5/10 | £75.00
Buy the Smono No.5 if: - You need all-day, away-from-a-plug runtime — swap an 18650 in seconds, carry spares, never plan around a socket - You want to see what the device is doing: a full-colour OLED with real-time temperature, battery level and Smart Puff status - You want the wider ceiling — 160–240°C, degree by degree, for full extraction rather than terp preservation - A 0.3g bowl suits you better than a 0.2g one, and you don't mind stirring at the halfway point
Buy the Smono No.3 if: - Flavour is the reason you're buying, full stop — pure convection through titanium at £75 has no rival at the price - You session in the evening at home, where a socket exists - You want the simplest interface on this page: plus, minus, a number, no modes, no technique, no stirring - You'd rather have nothing that can wobble than a lot of things that can
Quick Specs Face-Off:
| Smono No.5 | Smono No.3 | |
|---|---|---|
| Heating | Conduction + Smart Puff Identify | Pure convection |
| Chamber | ~0.3g ceramic | ~0.2g titanium |
| Heat-up | ~20 seconds | ~30–40 seconds |
| Battery | Removable 18650, 3000mAh Samsung, 90+ min | 1600mAh sealed, 5–6 sessions |
| Charging | USB-C ~90 min, or external charger | USB-C ~120 min |
| Temp range | 160–240°C, degree by degree | 160–220°C, degree by degree |
| Display | Full-colour OLED | Basic |
| Weight | ~150g | ~140g |
| Warranty | 3 years | 3 years |
| Price | £99.00 | £75.00 |
The Hook
Every record you love properly exists twice.
There's the original pressing: one disc, a single sleeve, no booklet, the running order somebody argued about in 1974 and got right. It looks like nothing on a shelf. Nobody photographs it. And then there's the deluxe reissue, which arrives ten years later in a gatefold with a bonus disc of demos, a fold-out essay by a journalist who wasn't there, and a hinged box that looks magnificent until the third time you open it.
The reissue is objectively more product. More minutes, more information, more things to look at while it plays. It is not, in the way that actually matters, more record — because somewhere in the process it got cut from a different source, and what you get is thicker, louder and slightly less like listening to musicians in a room.
The Smono No.5 is the deluxe reissue. The Smono No.3 is the original pressing. Same label, same catalogue, one is the version with everything on it and the other is the version people actually play.
I called the No.5 the Tesco Finest of vaporisers in its review, and the No.3 got the Aeropress treatment in its own. Set both aside — they were fair for each device alone, and they don't explain this pairing. What explains this pairing is that Smono sold a £75 device with pure convection through a titanium chamber, then sold a £99 device with an OLED screen, a swappable cell, a clever draw-detection system and conduction. Everything got better except the bit that makes vapour.
One of them scores higher. It's the plastic one. Here's why the reissue is still worth owning.
Both are covered in full at HerbVape.co.uk — pricing and availability below.
Vapour Quality
Winner: Smono No.3. 8/10 versus 7/10, and the gap is real rather than rounding.
The No.3 is pure convection — hot air pulled through the flower without it ever touching a hot wall — into a titanium chamber and out through borosilicate glass. Nothing in that path adds anything. Its review's line was what you pack is what you taste, and at 180°C the terps arrive individually rather than as one blended sweetness: five even draws, no stirring, no technique beyond a medium grind and a sensible pack. Its sweet spot is 195°C, where density comes up without the flavour going. Push past 210°C and the £75 shows: the heater can't sustain density, the vapour thins and you're drawing warm air.
The No.5 is conduction with an assist. The ceramic chamber heats the herb by contact, and Smart Puff Identify detects your draw and boosts the heater to hold temperature while air is passing through. It genuinely works — I expected marketing and got a measurable effect, which is a sentence I write rarely. At 180°C the first three draws are good, and the ceramic is properly neutral: no stainless tang, no aluminium warmth. Then draw four arrives and physics collects. The herb against the walls is spent, the middle hasn't started, and you stir or you settle for less. As I put it in that review: Smart Puff can only maintain temperature, it can't redistribute heat.
That's the whole difference in one sentence. The No.5 buys you a couple of extra good draws at the start of a bowl; the No.3 makes the whole bowl the start of the bowl. The No.5 will go to 240°C and the No.3 stops at 220, but that ceiling exists for extraction completeness, not flavour — nobody is up there for the terpenes.
The Strain Test, Side by Side
Honesty first, because it's the house style: neither of these was run on the site's Jack Herer and Wedding Cake control. Both were reviewed before that pair was standardised, so what follows compares like with like from the reviews as published — dessert hybrid against dessert hybrid, then two Skunk #1-lineage medical sativas at the same T20 potency, which is about as close to a controlled comparison as two separate reviews get. Both devices go back on the bench against the control at the next update, and I'd rather tell you that than dress up what I've got.
The dessert hybrid. The No.5 took Kush Mints — Animal Mints × Bubba Kush, 22–27% THC, limonene dominant with caryophyllene and linalool. At 180°C it produced the surprise of that review: mint, immediate and sharp, a clean cool menthol opening through ceramic and glass, three draws of properly bright character with Smart Puff holding 180°C through each inhale. Volatile mint terpenes are the first thing conduction usually kills, and they survived — genuinely above-average terp preservation for the heating type. Then draw four, the stir, two more draws at 195°C as the Animal Cookies side came through buttery and doughy, and the earthy kush foundation at 210. The No.3 took Apple Fritter — Sour Apple × Animal Cookies, 22–28% THC, caryophyllene dominant — and at 175°C gave apple sweetness that was pure, clean and unmistakable, limonene lifting the fruit, humulene underneath: three draws of artisan flavour out of a plastic device. At 185°C the pastry half asserted itself over four more draws, each one slightly different, because convection passes heat through the flower differently every time. Cinnamon and autumn at 200, two draws, done. Both devices resolved a bakery hybrid into nameable parts, which is the test — but one did it in two stages either side of a stir, and the other did it in nine continuous draws that kept changing. That's the reissue and the pressing exactly: same tracks, one has an edit in the middle.
The medical sativa. This is the closer comparison and the more useful one. The No.5 had Curaleaf Orange Skunk T20 — Orange Bud × Skunk #1, 20% THC, limonene forward — packed at 0.25g, slightly under full. At 175°C: bright, immediate, clean orange citrus, honest limonene with no chamber interference, two draws of good sativa clarity; skunk and pinene arriving at 190 over three more; one finishing draw at 200. The No.3 had Noidecs T20 Lemon Skunk — Skunk #1 lineage, 20% THC, limonene dominant with terpinolene — at 0.15g, deliberately under-packed for microdosing. At 170°C the review recorded the strongest sentence in it: the limonene was sharper, brighter and more distinct than through any conduction device tested at any price, with terpinolene shimmering underneath in that incense-like way haze genetics only do through convection. Same terpene, same potency, same Skunk parentage, two different resolutions of it — and the No.5's own review says so, in its own words: the citrus came through adequately, not with the precision of the No.3's convection, but clearly enough for medical patients to taste their strain. The reissue's sleeve notes crediting the original pressing.
The call: the No.3 is the better-sounding record and neither review pretends otherwise. What the No.5 has is duration — a 0.3g bowl and a battery that doesn't end the evening, which for a patient dosing across a whole day is not a small thing. Flavour per draw goes to the No.3. Draws per day goes to the No.5.
Design & Build
Dead heat on score — 6/10 apiece — and they earn the six from opposite ends.
The No.3's exterior is honest-to-god budget plastic. It flexes if you squeeze it and creaks if you grip it while drawing, and next to anything DaVinci makes the material gap is visible across a room. Inside that shell sits titanium and borosilicate glass. Exterior B&M, interior John Lewis — it is a plain white sleeve with a very good record in it, and it's a Fenix Mini rebadge with Smono's three-year warranty on top, which is a fact rather than a scandal.
The No.5 looks the part and then fails at a hinge. The OLED is bright and informative, the glass mouthpiece is proper, the cell slides in with a satisfying click — and the battery door latch, the single most-documented complaint about this device, wears with use. Not on day one. Somewhere between month three and month six of opening, swapping and closing, the mechanism loosens and the compartment starts to rattle. It doesn't stop the device firing. It stops you trusting the device, which at £99 is worse.
Mum settled this one for me on a monthly visit, without being asked. She picked the No.5 up off the kitchen counter, felt it move, and did what she has done to every suspect appliance since 1988 — held it beside her ear and shook it twice. "Something's loose in it, love." I explained about the door. She put it down, picked up the plastic one, turned it over, and said: "That one's older, isn't it. It doesn't rattle."
Both reviews ran the formal Mum test separately, and both results stand — the No.3 passed on the buttons, the No.5 came back moderate on the strength of the OLED and lost ground to the removable-battery concept, which she considered an invitation to worry. The rattle wasn't part of either. It should have been.
Winner: draw on score; No.3 on nerves. One of them looks cheap and stays as it was. The other looks expensive and gets worse.
Battery & Charging
Winner: Smono No.5, and it isn't close — 9/10 versus 5/10, the widest gap on the card.
The No.5 runs a removable 18650: a 3000mAh Samsung cell, 90-plus minutes of use, swapped in seconds, replaced for about a fiver when the chemistry fades. It charges over USB-C in roughly ninety minutes or, better, on an external charger, which is both faster and kinder to the cell. Dave's three-cell rotation — use one, charge two — is documented in that review and it is, annoyingly, the correct way to own a vaporiser. Pass-through isn't recommended, so don't plan on it.
The No.3 has 1600mAh, sealed, five to six sessions per charge and about two hours to refill. A heavy user drains it before lunch. A moderate user gets an evening. A microdoser gets a day. And because it's sealed, the degradation is permanent: after twelve to eighteen months of daily use expect less than you started with, and the three-year warranty won't help, because wear isn't a defect.
This is the bonus disc, and it's the good kind — the one with the demos everyone actually wanted. If your use case is festivals, long days out, shifts, or anywhere a socket is theoretical, the No.5 is the only one of these two that can do it, and no amount of terp clarity closes that gap. Four points of battery is a lot of points to give away and still lose the match.
Ease of Use
Winner: Smono No.3. 8/10 versus 7/10.
The No.3 is simple by subtraction. Plus, minus, a number, a bowl so small you can barely overpack it. Medium grind, drop it in, don't compress, draw — convection does the rest, and its own review called that convection surprisingly forgiving, which is not a word budget convection usually earns. No modes. No app. No stirring. Its slowest thing is the heat-up: 30 to 40 seconds, against the No.5's twenty, and that's a real daily annoyance rather than a spec-sheet one.
The No.5 gives you more to work with and more to manage. The OLED makes temperature selection genuinely intuitive — you set a number and see the number, which shouldn't be a luxury at £99 and is. Smart Puff removes a decision: you don't judge when the device is ready, you just draw. Against that, earlier firmware false-triggered — drawing without inhaling would wake the heater — and while v5.4 mostly fixes it, reports persist; update on day one. Then there's the stirring, mid-bowl, every bowl, and the battery door as one more mechanical step that the No.3 simply doesn't have.
If you have ADHD, and I do, that arithmetic matters more than it looks. The No.5's screen reduces one kind of load and its door and its stir add another. The No.3 asks for nothing at all except that you remember to charge it — which, given the battery, is a genuine catch-22 and the honest counter-argument to this entire section.
Cleaning & Maintenance
Winner: Smono No.3 — 7/10 versus 6/10 — mostly because there's less of it to clean.
A 0.2g titanium chamber brushes out in seconds, resists staining better than ceramic or steel, and accumulates less residue per session simply because less goes in it. Glass mouthpiece into ISO, out spotless. The airpath is the awkward bit — pipe cleaners or compressed air for the internal channel — and that's the extent of the complaint.
The No.5 is standard ceramic cleanup, which is fine, plus two chores the No.3 doesn't have. The airpath is less accessible than the No.3's titanium setup, and the mouthpiece gasket degrades with frequent removal — plan on replacing it annually, and add a weekly wipe of the battery door contacts to the list. That last one is the door taxing you twice: once in confidence, once in labour.
Neither of these is difficult. Both would feel like a holiday to anyone who has taken apart a cooling unit. But the reissue's box has more compartments, and every compartment collects dust.
Portability
Straight draw: 7/10 each, and the ten-gram difference is not a difference.
The No.3 is ~140g, compact, pocketable in a jacket, tolerable in jeans, with a glass mouthpiece that punishes loose pocket carry the way all glass mouthpieces do. Stealth is middling: not pen-shaped, not Mighty-sized.
The No.5 is ~150g and the same story with two footnotes. The 18650 adds a touch of bulk over a sealed cell, and the OLED — the feature you're paying for — is unreadable in direct sunlight, which is a genuinely funny place for a premium display to fail.
The tiebreaker isn't size. It's what happens after ninety minutes out of the house: the No.5 takes a spare cell in a coat pocket and keeps going, while the No.3 becomes an object you're carrying. On paper this is a draw. On a day out it isn't.
Value for Money
Winner: Smono No.3. 9/10 versus 8/10, with £24 running the same way.
£75 buys pure convection, a titanium chamber, a glass mouthpiece, degree-by-degree control, USB-C and a three-year warranty. Read the spec list, then read the price again. Nothing else at this money delivers convection this clean, and it beats devices at three times the price on flavour alone. The battery and the plastic are the compromises — everything else punches two weight classes up.
The No.5 at £99 is not bad value; it's awkwardly positioned value, which is a different problem. The spec list is competitive and the removable-18650-plus-OLED-plus-Smart-Puff combination genuinely isn't sold by anyone else at the price. But the Smono 4 Pro does hybrid heating with a 3000mAh sealed cell and an OLED at £85, fourteen quid below it, and the XLUX Roffu does true convection with dual chambers and its own removable 18650 at £109, a tenner above. The No.5 sits in the gap between them, and if you're flexible on any single one of its three headline features, both neighbours are friendlier.
You buy the reissue for the bonus disc. If you're not going to play the bonus disc, you're buying a nicer box.
Score Comparison
| Category | Smono No.5 | Smono No.3 |
|---|---|---|
| Vapour Quality | 7.0/10 | 8.0/10 |
| Design & Build | 6.0/10 | 6.0/10 |
| Battery & Charging | 9.0/10 | 5.0/10 |
| Ease of Use | 7.0/10 | 8.0/10 |
| Cleaning & Maintenance | 6.0/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Portability | 7.0/10 | 7.0/10 |
| Value for Money | 8.0/10 | 9.0/10 |
| Overall | 7.2/10 | 7.5/10 |
Five categories to one, with two draws — and the one is worth four points, which is why the overall is three-tenths rather than a landslide. Read the table honestly and it says something specific: the No.5 wins the category about when you can vape, and loses every category about what happens when you do.
Who Should Buy Which
Buy the Smono No.5 if your problem is access, not quality. You're out all day, on shifts, at festivals, or medically dependent on the device being ready when the pain arrives rather than when the charger says so. Three cells in rotation is genuine zero-anxiety ownership at this price, and nothing else under £120 combines it with a colour OLED and working draw detection. You accept a stir at the halfway mark, you'll update the firmware on day one, and you've read about the battery door and decided a rattle is a rattle.
Buy the Smono No.3 if your problem is flavour and your budget stops at £100 — which, on this site's scores, makes it the correct answer for most people reading this. Evening sessions at a desk, a socket within reach, microdosing off a 0.2g bowl, and the best terp separation anyone sells for seventy-five quid. You'll forgive the plastic within a week. You will not forgive the battery, but you'll plan around it, because everyone who owns one does.
The wrong buyer for the No.5 is the flavour chaser who bought it for the spec sheet. The wrong buyer for the No.3 is anyone who leaves the house for eight hours and expects the vape to come along.
How I Actually Choose
The rotation data doesn't lie, and I keep rotation data, because ADHD.
The No.3 is the one on the desk at seven in the evening. 185°C, 0.2g, medium grind, four or five draws, put it down. It's also the one that goes into the case when a new prescription jar turns up, because I want the cleanest reading of what's in it before habits form. Its own review is right that the plastic embarrasses you and the vapour converts you — Tom's Mighty+ is still on a shelf under a Post-it that says FIX, and I've stopped asking.
The No.5 comes out when the plan involves a train. Two cells in a coat pocket, 190°C, 0.3g, stir at the halfway point, and at no stage of the day do I think about a socket — that's what Dave's three-cell case is for, and it's why Jake's rubber-band repair, ridiculous as it is, keeps his in service rather than in a drawer. Days out are the No.5's entire argument, and it wins them outright.
What settles it is the ratio. I'm home most evenings. Most people are. If I were on the road four days a week the No.5 would be the daily and the No.3 would be the weekend indulgence, and this article would end differently — but I'm not, and the version of me that exists reaches for the record, not the box it came in.
The Verdict (The Bookend)
Nobody has ever loved an album for its booklet.
The deluxe reissue is the better object. More on the shelf, more to look at, and a bonus disc that in this case is genuinely worth having — a removable 3000mAh cell is the best battery arrangement in the budget bracket and it earns every one of its nine points. But it was cut from a different source, and you can hear it: conduction is conduction, Smart Puff or no Smart Puff, and by draw four you're stirring a bowl the No.3 would still be halfway through.
So it's the No.3, 7.5 to 7.2, at £24 less — a plastic device with a titanium heart that outperforms its own upgrade on the only metric that survives the first month. It'll frustrate you: five or six sessions, two hours to charge, sealed, and slower to heat than the thing it beat. That's the original pressing for you. One disc, no extras, no gatefold, and every time you play it you remember why they bothered reissuing it.
Buy the reissue if you need what's on the second disc. Otherwise, buy the record.
FAQ
Smono No.5 vs Smono No.3 — which should I buy? The No.3 for most people: it scores higher (7.5 vs 7.2), costs £24 less (£75.00 vs £99.00), and wins vapour quality, ease of use, cleaning and value. Buy the No.5 only if you need all-day battery away from a plug — its removable 18650 is the single best thing either device does.
Is the battery door really that bad? Not immediately. Day one it's fine, month three you'll notice, month six it rattles. Not every unit, but documented often enough that I put it in the review and I'm repeating it here. It doesn't stop the device working — the cell still makes contact and it still fires. It just stops feeling like a £99 device.
Does Smart Puff make conduction as good as convection? No, and I say that as someone who expected the feature to be nonsense and found that it works. It holds temperature while you're drawing, which conduction otherwise loses to airflow, and that buys a draw or two of extra flavour. It can't redistribute heat inside the bowl, so you still stir, and you still don't get what pure convection gives you below 190°C.
Which one is better for medical use? Depends what you're optimising. For terpene-specific dosing and precision at low temperatures, the No.3 — its Lemon Skunk result at 170°C is the clearest limonene either device produced. For reliability across a full day, when a flare doesn't check whether you charged anything, the No.5's swappable cell is the more clinically useful feature. Both carry the same three-year warranty.
Can I use dosing capsules in both? Yes — the Smono Dosing Capsule Set is listed with both devices, and pre-loading is worth it on the No.3 in particular, where the 0.2g chamber is small enough to be fiddly on the go.
What temperature should I actually run them at? The No.3 lives at 175–195°C and falls apart above 210 — its convection can't sustain density up there. The No.5's usable range is wider (up to 240°C) but the top of it is for extraction completeness, not flavour; 190°C is my default. If you're unsure which end of the range suits you, the temperature guide is the place to start.
Should I just buy the Smono 4 Pro instead? It's the question both reviews keep running into, and it's fair: £85 buys hybrid heating, a 3000mAh sealed cell, an OLED and the same warranty, sitting exactly between these two on price. It's the better all-rounder than the No.5. It is not the better flavour device than the No.3. That's a separate comparison and it exists.
About Dennis M.
Dennis M. has been reviewing vaporisers and vaping daily for the best part of a decade. He works in IT, has ADHD, and uses cannabis for chronic pain management. He lives in Manchester with his partner Sarah, who has pointed out that both of these are plastic, both are Smonos, and one of them rattles, and would like to know which part of that constitutes a collection.
Dennis owns three deluxe reissues of records he already had. He has played the bonus disc of one of them, once, and describes the experience as "interesting."
A note on spelling: 'vaporizer' is the de facto international spelling, but I've stuck with the British 'vaporiser' throughout this blog.
Questions, corrections, or a device you want tested? dennis@herbvape.co.uk
Related Content
Full Reviews: - Smono No.5 Review: The Tesco Finest of Vaporisers → - Smono No.3 Review: The Aeropress of Vaporisers →
More Comparisons: - All head-to-heads →
New to Vaping? - The Temperature Guide → - How I score devices →
Get Them at HerbVape.co.uk {#shop}
Smono No.5 — £99.00 Not currently listed on the shop, so there's no product link to give you — the full review has the detail in the meantime.
Smono No.3 — £75.00 Also not currently listed, same caveat — start with the full review.
If you want a Smono you can actually put in a basket today, the Smono 4 Pro at £85.00 is the one that keeps coming up in both of these reviews, and it comes up for a reason.
Just one more bowl.
Review Policy: I buy or borrow the devices I review. HerbVape.co.uk is my employer, but my opinions are my own — they pay me to be honest, not to sell you shite. Affiliate links and discount codes exist because running a site costs money, not because they influence scores.
A note on strains: this site normally runs Jack Herer and Wedding Cake through every device as a fixed control. Neither Smono was tested on that pair. The No.5 was assessed on Kush Mints (hybrid, 22–27% THC, limonene-dominant with caryophyllene and linalool) and Curaleaf Orange Skunk T20 (sativa medical, 20% THC, limonene/myrcene/pinene); the No.3 on Apple Fritter (hybrid, ~22–28% THC, caryophyllene-dominant) and Noidecs T20 Lemon Skunk (sativa medical, ~20% THC, limonene-dominant with terpinolene). The comparison above pairs like with like — two Animal-lineage dessert hybrids, two Skunk #1-lineage limonene sativas at the same potency — but it is not the control, and I'd rather say so than pretend. Both devices are due a proper Jack Herer and Wedding Cake run. Strain effects vary by individual, batch and consumption method.
Medical & Legal Disclaimer: Nothing in this comparison constitutes medical advice, and I am not a medical professional. Cannabis is a controlled substance in the UK; medical cannabis is legal only on prescription from a registered specialist clinic. HerbVape.co.uk sells vaporiser hardware only: we do not sell, prescribe, or recommend cannabis or cannabis products. Vaporisers are sold for use with legal dry herbs and legally prescribed medical cannabis. You must be 18 or over to buy one, and cannabis law varies by jurisdiction — check yours.
Last updated: 26 August 2026.