With the increase in popularity, touchscreen-enabled phones have solved one problem and created several more. Of those new problems, perhaps one of the more troubling ones pertains to cold weather-living people. How exactly do you keep your hands warm and push all of those onscreen buttons? You typical capacitive touchscreen needs some type of resistance to register input. The human skin is great for this. Gloves — not so much. In recent years, however, a new push to create gloves that work with touchscreens has begun.
The fruits of that labor have given us gloves such as the IsoToner SmarTouch. You may have seen these or similar gloves on tech websites, magazines, and maybe even TV already. The big question: Do they actually deliver on both fronts — keeping your hands warm and allowing easy, efficient touchscreen interaction?
Step inside to find out.
IsoToners are a household name of sorts. For one, they’ve been around for years. Scratch that — decades. Over those countless years, the Isotoner brand has built up quite a name in both performance and quality. Second, while gloves of 1982 didn’t have to do much more than keep your hands relatively warm and dry, the year 2010 requires a bit more of our mits. First up: Warmth.
Warmth, fit, comfort
Lucky for me, I have rather small, slender hands. Translation: the gloves fit like a dream. They’re snug to the point of being perfect for situations in where you need a high degree of finger articulation. They’re also relatively thin which means that in conjunction with nimble nubs, you are free to pick up small objects as well as perform numerous other tasks that again, require precision.
But on the flip side, that articulation and flexible construction comes at a price — warmth. Sitting here in my 72 degree living room means it’s easy to say “Oh yeah, they’re reall warm”. The real test obviously needs to be done in more extreme temperatures. Taking a trip outside in the 32 degree morning air (which it was this morning…brrr) nets the same result — my little digits are kept nice and warm. While we’re at it, I’ll add that the interior of the SmarTouch are super soft. Like, really soft. A soft supple cushion only adds to the quality feel of these gloves.
Now, 32 degrees is cold, but it’s not that cold. I’m not so confident that these gloves would keep me and my fingers happy at sub-zero temperatures, playing in snow, or even getting damp/wet at 30 degrees. Nevertheless, I felt confident that after 20 minutes outside at my chilly 32 degree morning, the SmarTouch gloves could have easily survived another 8-9 hours with no ill effects to myself — effects such as frost bite, gangrene, and dropping of fingers. You know, minor things.
Tactical feedback, ease of use
This part is pretty easy: tactical feedback on my iPhone 4 was good. Not great. Not poor. But merely good. Now don’t let that discourage you. Normal gloves require you to completely take your gloves off just to use touchscree, so clearly the SmarTouch have a leg — Or is that finger? — up on the situation. Typing doesn’t require any special action or change in typing style. Just be yourself. I found that on every 10-15 charters attempted, the SmarTouch would miss roughly 2-4 characters. Mind you, I was trying to type a rather brisk 30-35 wpm. Part of it could be because of the finger pads being larger than my own finger tips causing me to press down on the wrong area of the screen. It could also be because of the material used in the gloves’ finger tips themselves.
But even at a crude 1-in-5 error rate, these gloves are still phenomenal. Besides, texting/emails aren’t the only thing you do with a touchscreen. There are plenty of other actions that require your fingers to touch that smooth, cold glass. On that front, the SmarTouches excel wonderfully.
Conclusion
For a mild to colder weather glove, the SmarTouch gloves by IsoToner do keep your hands nice and toasty warm. In regards to their gadget-loving marketing image, they again excel — albeit not quite as perfectly. But even with a relatively high error rate when texting, the simple fact that you can actually keep your gloves on and operate your touchscreen phone are pretty sweet.
For $30-$40 USD (depending on where you shop), you really can’t go wrong here. If you’ve got a touchscreen phone and are tired of being inconvenienced by having to constantly remove your gloves, these are your paw warmers right here.
A special thank you to IsoToner for providing me with a review sample of SmarTouch gloves.
