Of the handful — pun intended — of touch control-friendly gloves we’ve seen for iPods, iPhones, and iPads over the years, the solutions offered by Freehands are a little… well, different from the best designs we’ve seen. One of the options, Power Stretch ($24), is billed as “unisex” and sold in versions with two or five capacitive fingertips per glove.
The version that arrived here was too small for our adult male hands to wear and not exactly fashion-neutral thanks to the Spandex-like Polartec material, but the highly visible fingertips do work to control iOS touchscreens. Ragg-Wool ($20) is essentially a wool glove with two fingers per hand that can be flipped downwards to expose your own fingertips for touch interactions; the innovation here is in using magnets to hold the flipped-open tips backwards.
Grippy rubber dots are used on the palm-facing side of each glove, while 40-gram Thinsulate provides warmth. Again, we found our sample to be a bit on the tight side, so you’ll want to make sure you have the right size before ordering, but these gloves aren’t bad — touch-through dots would have seemed like a gimme for this design, though.
Our Rating
Company and Price
Company: Freehands
Website: www.Freehands.com
Models: Power Stretch, Ragg-Wool
Price: $20-$24
Compatible: All iPads, iPhones, iPods
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