Touchscreen gloves for cold days: Agloves and iPrints

Too cold to use your smartphone? With the current cold snap, it's no use having apps that tell you when your bus is coming or whether your train home has been delayed by the weather if you can't use your touchscreen phone without taking off your gloves and freezing your fingers. These two phone-friendly gloves aim to put your phone back at your fingertips without the windchill.

The Agloves are lightweight knitted woollen gloves that look like they're made from a tweedy flecked dark grey yarn. The grey flecks are actually silver thread, which makes the knit conductive, letting you touch a capacitive screen and have it work as normal. You have to tap a little more firmly and carefully than with your bare hands, especially if you're pressing a capacitive button and you have to scroll a little more slowly, but that's a definite improvement on either freezing or not being able to use your phone.


With the Agloves you can work your phone and stay warm

Unlike gloves that just have one or two fingertips of conductive fabric, the whole Aglove is conductive, so you can use whichever finger you want, or the side of your thumb (for pinch zoom or even just swiping, you often use the side of your finger or thumb rather than the pads). The only disadvantage is that the gloves make your fingers a little wider, so if you're not careful you can hit the next key on an on-screen keyboard with the fabric instead of the key your finger is centred on; that's not a problem for the big buttons on a phone dialler screen or for selecting a contact you need to call. We were even able to type email and Twitter messages on an on-screen keyboard; slowly and with more mistakes than usual, but with care you can write what you want to say. And you can type with fingers on both hands or use whichever finger is most comfortable.

Having metal woven into the gloves might make you expect them to conduct the cold as well as your body's natural capacitance. We didn't find that, even wearing them in sub-zero temperatures in Amsterdam and London this week. Agloves tells us that NASA uses silver in astronaut clothing because it offers the best thermal regulation of any metal. Certainly, the gloves don't get cold the way metal jewellery does on a chilly day. However these are a fairly thin knit to keep them from being too bulky to type in. If it's bitterly cold or you're out skiing, you will still feel the cold. Agloves are available from Staples, O2 and Vodafone stores, or you can order them from http://www.agloves.eu/ for £20.99 including postage.

If you'd rather stick with your favourite gloves, try the £6 iPrints adhesive strips (on sale at Blacks or from http://www.iprints.org.uk). You stick one of these onto the finger of any pair of gloves to make them work with a touchscreen.


Stick an iPrint onto your favourite gloves to make them touchscreen friendly

The instructions suggest you put the iPrint on your forefinger and press it with your thumb while you touch the screen. That's not always comfortable, but we found with a thin pair of gloves that we didn't usually need to press on the strip; it mostly worked when we just touched the phone screen. The strip is fairly rigid and if you have small fingers it's worth using the template supplied to trim it to size before sticking it on, to make sure it doesn't peel off the side of your finger. The rigid surface also gets in the way a bit when you press the home button on an iPhone or other physical buttons, although it works perfectly on capacitive buttons like those on the Lumia 800.


Touch your phone, but only with one finger

Again, you have to touch the screen a little more slowly and deliberately than usual, but you can tap, slide and swipe almost as normal. The iPrint is large enough that you can use the side of your finger if that's more comfortable. But with only one working finger you can't pinch and zoom; there is a spare iPrint in the packet that you could put on your thumb, but with two digits that aren't as flexible as usual your gloves may be less comfortable. Typing with one finger is definitely less comfortable and we weren't able to type quite as accurately as in the Agloves. But for checking messages, making calls and keeping tabs on your journey home, the iPrints are cheap and convenient — and you don't have to change your gloves.

Mary Branscombe