I have that first-world winter problem: how do I keep my hands warm and also use my iPhone?
According to this article at Salon.com, there aren’t many great options. It seems that unless you are made of money, you can have accuracy or warmth, but not both.
My Crappy Glove Situation escalated last month, when my students and I spent an afternoon outside in 20ish degree weather at Cat Tales, a large cat rescue and zoo here in Spokane. I’d brought a camera, but the battery was dead, so I ended up relying on my iPhone for shots of tigers (white, Siberian, Bengal), cougars, a black bear, and a scruffy lion. And so commenced the dance with which many W&L readers are familiar: the glove is repeatedly removed for photo-taking or twitter checking and then replaced.
I confess that I bought these screaming yellow xhilaration gloves (pictured above with Wilkie, one of the WanderCats) because I thought their contrasting gray and white fingertips were unusual (and they were $2 on clearance at Target, where WanderChic had gift card from Santa burning a hole in her purse). It was only upon closer inspection that I saw the tag: “touchscreen compatible.”
I’m still in the early stages of my rigorous, scientific testing. So far I’ve found that these cheapo gloves make my texting even slower and sloppier. But with a bit of practice, I think I’ll improve. (The Salon article is not optimistic about gloves with conductive thread in the fingertips). If I just need to zip onto Facebook, they’ll be fine. If I’m going to type my next blog post while standing outside in 20 degree weather, then I should just go inside.
The gloves at the top of this post are from etsy seller yastik izi. They score points for the whimsy factor, though they’re priced a bit out of my league. And the design favors us right-handed folks. If you’re a lefty, wouldn’t the flipped gloves show a frowny face instead of an emoticon smile? That hardly seems fair.
These handmade gloves above are from Greenbriar Creations, another etsy store. They’re more reasonably priced, and I dig their asymmetrical sunset hues. We know that WanderChic is a sucker for color, especially in the bleak mid-winter.