The cold can come as a bit of a shock after being cocooned in your toasty warm home for the festive season. It’s freezing out there, literally. But you can’t avoid getting your poor little fingers out if you have a touchscreen phone and want to send a message, take a call or use an app. This is because capacitive touchscreens use your fingertip to conduct electricity. With normal gloves you end up just pawing ineffectually at the screen but don’t despair there is a solution. Get yourself a pair of special gloves and enjoy the best of both worlds:
Semi-fingerless gloves
Etre Touchy gloves (pictured right) aren’t quite fingerless and aren’t quite full on gloves; they’re the happy medium between warmth and touchscreen contentment. With the index finger and thumb portions omitted, most of your hand will stay toasty whilst the workhorse digits are free to scroll, type, flick and tap to your heart’s content. Available in a range of colours and sizes, but for a princely sum of £19.99.
Conductive gloves
The North Face E-tip gloves have a silicon panel on the palm and index fingers so your movements are registered on a touchscreen. With grippy patterning across the palm-side of the gloves, you won’t drop your phone in the snow either. The E-tip gloves are available from Triads.co.uk for £20.00
There are all manner of other options in the special conducting glove category, from the knitted to the boutique – but most are available only in the USA at the moment and will set you back a pretty penny. Early last year even Apple patented “a glove system for operating an electronic device“, although we’re yet to see any further developments on this yet…
Make your own
Not a fan of the styles above? Get crafty and make your favourite gloves work with a touchscreen phone – Instructables.com has a great tutorial which shows you how quick and easy it is to customise a pair so that they’ll register on the touchscreen. All you need are some gloves you actually like, a needle, some conductive thread and the gift of sight, making it the cheapest and greenest option around. If you’re feeling super crafty, you could even knit your own gloves – but be warned! It takes some pretty advanced knitting.
Go traditional – capped gloves
There’s just no substitute for using your actual finger when using a touchscreen phone so fingerless gloves are the ideal solution – but with a cap to transform your gloves into mittens when you’ve finished fiddling with your phone, you don’t have to compromise on heat loss either.
We like the plain ones on the left from Monsoon (£9.00) – and don’t worry boys, here are some manly Burton ones for you (£9.00).
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