NuTouch Touch Screen Gloves

December 21st, 2012 by

nutouchgloves1A problem I’m sure is common to most people who live in colder climates in this day and age is that it’s quite frustrating when you’re shovelling snow or waiting for a bus and you can’t use your smartphone without taking your gloves off and risking losing feeling in your hands for the rest of the day.  While there are several touch screen glove solutions floating around out there to ensure our hands live for another day, most will either run you between $20-$30 for a single pair or be of such poor quality that they’re essentially useless.  This is where Newer Technology comes in with their $9 NuTouch conductive touch screen gloves.  Do these gloves keep your hands toasty-warm while letting you use your touch devices, or do they leave you out in the cold?  We’ll touch on our time with them after the jump.

Saskatchewan is a uniquely perfect place to test winter wear of all kinds.  As I’m writing this it’s -26 Celsius outside (about -15 Fahrenheit for silly people still using Fahrenheit) with “light flurries”, also known as sun-tanning weather.  Anyways, during the winter months we’re no strangers to needing to put a parka on just to go get your mail out of the mailbox.  Being someone who uses their iPhone a lot in these kind of weather conditions, I’ve often found myself freezing my hands into claw-like nubs while trying to do something as simple as checking my email while waiting for a bus. 

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Before going into the particulars of my glove testing, I’ll talk about these gloves’ specs.  As pictured above, they come in a dark grey colour and the conductive fingertips are slightly darker, but not to the point of looking silly.  The darker colour of the gloves make them fairly versatile as far as fashion is concerned.  I was able to wear them just as easily with my formal evening wear as I was with my every day stuff.  They’re made of 52% Cotton, 24% Rayon, 10% Spandex and the conductive material for the fingertips takes up the remaining 14%, Silver Nylon.  Unlike many of their competitors, the gloves are conductive on all ten fingers, so if you’re doing any iPad-ing in a cold environment, you won’t have to hen-peck on the touch screen keyboard.  The gloves come in S,M,L,XL sizes ranging from 7 1/4″ to 9 5/8″ hand lengths respectively, or from smallish to Andre the Giant size.  For most things including hats, shoes, shirts, gloves you usually can’t put enough Xs in front of the L for me, but my dainty hands clocked in as a M on the NuTouch size scale.  The large glove sizes show that these are meant for adults more than children. 

For testing, I replaced my usual red Canadian Olympic 2012 mitts with the NuTouch gloves for a week.  They experienced a dressy event, shovelling my driveway, knocking a large buildup of snow off of our garage, many random errands, and a single regular wash (even though it’s recommended that you hand-wash them — make sure to hang them to dry, though) over the test period and I was generally quite impressed at every turn.  Aside from it being a little more slick and not leaving fingerprints, there’s no mechanical difference between using the gloves or not.  I never had to worry or even think about what part of the gloves were touching the phone, they always worked perfectly with my iPhone without any missed taps. 

While the gloves are soft and comfortable, the only downside that I can think about them is that they’re not terribly insulating.  Just like the regular cotton gloves that they would replace, they’re more for temperatures around -15 Celcius or above.  You’ll definitely feel the chill if you try to use them instead of something like Hot Paws when it’s nearing -30.  NewerTech has thought of this, though, and right on the package it says, “Wear them by themselves, or as liners with heavier cold winter gloves.”  That didn’t originally make any sense to me (they won’t magically imbue gloves put over them with touch screen interactivity), but when I gave it a swing while shovelling my driveway the cleverness of this mitt set-up dawned on me.  Firstly, it makes your larger gloves even warmer, which is great, or even allows you to wear slightly lighter gloves or mitts than you normally would because of the extra insulation.  When you want to do something on your phone, you just pop off a heavier glove like you normally would, but now instead of scrambling to do something on your phone before you need to start filing for a membership to the War Amps, you can take your time because the NuTouch gloves are there to protect your hands for longer than normal.

All-in-all, the NuTouch gloves work exactly as described and are a godsend for smartphone laden Canadians (and people in other cold places).  At a price that is anywhere from 50-75% lower than many of its competitors with top-notch build quality, NuTouch gloves would make a perfect (late) Christmas present for any techies on your list.

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  • Soft and comfortable
  • Work with most fashion attires for both sexes
  • Come in many large sizes
  • Work as well as bare hands with touchscreens (plus no fingerprints!)
  • A steal at $9, much cheaper than competitiors
  • Well-made
  • Could perhaps be a bit warmer

Rated 9.8

A review pair of gloves was provided to us by Newer Technology