Whether the great polar vortex of 2014 has dissipated or is coming back, winter’s still got a couple months in it. In some places, that can mean the tough choice between using your smartphone and keeping your hands warm. There are a number of touchscreen gloves on the market, and I’ve tried a few, but many of them tend to be thin knitted gloves that provide minimal protection from the cold.
Mujjo makes a couple types of touchscreen gloves, and their latest is the Double-Layered Touchscreen Gloves. They’re still knit gloves, but (as you’d expect) with two layers, making them nice and warm. There’s a small bit of faux leather trim with a snap on the wrist, and the fingers and palm are covered with little rubber grip dots that’ll help keep you from fumbling your phone.
Mujjo sent me a couple pairs to try out. I liked the warmth and thickness of the gloves—while they’re not going to be enough for snow day activities (they’d just get soaked), they do feel more like actual winter gloves instead of glove liners. I didn’t really care for the snap, which felt like it was stretching out the fabric when I tugged on it, but fortunately there’s enough stretch that I can get the gloves on and off without undoing the snap.
One thing I did notice is that the fingers are fairly short. I have slightly longer-than-average fingers, but they’re not monstrously large, and it seemed like the overall proportions of the gloves were bigger in the palm and shorter in the fingers, meaning that I can’t splay my fingers out all the way while wearing the gloves. The rep at Mujjo explained that the gloves do need to have a snug fit for the touchscreen, but I hadn’t expected that the XL size was still just a tiny bit short. (The M/L size that they sent first were simply too small.)
The grip dots on the gloves are nice—using my iPad with gloves on usually feels like tempting fate, but the tiny rubber dots do a great job of keeping things from slipping around. (They were even nice for driving.) And using the touchscreen while wearing gloves works well, too—the rubber dots don’t extend all the way to the fingertips, so you can still swipe without sticking. The gloves use silver-coated nylon fibers to make them conductive.
Like other knitted gloves, the fingertips to start to show some wear, with little snags developing on most of the tips as I wear the gloves for general use. I imagine some of this may be exacerbated by the short fingers. I usually wear holes in the fingertips of knitted gloves, and I imagine the double layer is only going to prevent that for so long, but time will tell.
Right now I’m only seeing the double-layered touchscreen gloves for sale on Mujjo’s site, for €24.75 (roughly $35 US), but some of their other versions are available on Amazon if you want something lighter weight. Just keep in mind that they run a little small, or at least the double-layered version does.
For more info, visit the Mujjo website.
Disclosure: Mujjo provided a sample for review.
Jon,
I’ll preface this with “you must get these type of notes all the time,” but, if you’d like to save some $$ (and who wouldn’t), you can find an almost identical pair of gloves made by a company called Glider “Winter Style” for $22.95 from Amazon. Same dual layer construction and rubberized dots on the palm. And, in the interest of full disclosure, the fingers on the XL are also short which I’ve rationalized that if the gloves don’t fit tightly it makes it harder to be precise on the small touchscreens. Both lines are likely intentionally tight with stretchy woven fabric construction. Just a thought.