Winter and Touch Sensitive Technology

Written By: Brandon Marchek

Winter is soon on its way, and recent morning temperatures are starting to reflect that. Many college students are now traveling to their morning classes with coats bundled around their shoulders and gloves on their hands, making the use of their expensive iPods, iPhones and other touch screen technologies virtually useless. With gloves covering their fingertips, the click wheels and sensors that use capacitive coupling through your finger to sense movement have a hard time reading them. Your fingertips are no longer conductive.

Products such as Freehands have attempted to tackle this problem by creating gloves that can uncover your forefinger and thumb in order to operate your high-tech, touch screen gadgets. The thought process is rather simple. Fold back the material, make your selections, and cover your fingers back up again. Magnets in the fingers allow the material to flop back and stick to the back of your hand, without them bouncing around as you type. It is a rather stylish item that can set you back $20-$40 depending on your choice of material (leather, fleece and stretch).

There is, however, a cheaper solution. Refrain from texting, or selecting music while in cold temperatures outside. The world keeps on going. Society today has become too dependent on their personal technologies that it is starting to develop clothing to better suit their needs for this. I suppose, this is one flaw of the newer technologies. It is only comfortable, or possible even, to operate them in ideal conditions. Once the temperature drops, it becomes increasingly difficult to perform the same task. Although, there is probably a huge market for this item, one thing is for sure…tangible buttons can always be operated in any temperature.