November 4, 2009 - 3:28pm

The touch of a glove on your iPhone

My friend Philip is a heck of a guy. The owner of a very successful high-tech business, he’s also a dedicated father, a distinguished humanitarian and an all-around good person. He went to Harvard, so I generally think he’s smart, but I wasn’t so sure on a very cold day last winter. I saw him dialling his iPhone with his nose.

The reason, he said, was because the iPhone’s touchpad works best when it can sense body temperature. With his gloves on, he had a hard time dialing, but he was so cold he didn’t want to take them off. So, he used his nose.

When you get right down to it, dialing any phone – let alone punching in text messages – is almost impossible with gloves on. But now iPhone owners can get another advantage over the owners of other mobile devices.

Two 22-year-old friends – Chris Harrison from Iowa and Larry Lairson from New York City – have come up with gloves that allow iPhone users to access their devices as though they had bare hands. With specially designed fingertip pads that conduct heat from the wearer’s hands, the DOTS Gloves can be used to operate an iPhone in any type of weather while at the same time keeping the users’ hands warm and dry. Of course, they are no better than regular gloves at dialing more traditional, non-heat-sensitive phones.

And unlike previous attempts at making cell phone-ready gloves that looked like space-age catcher’s mitts, DOTS Gloves actually look pretty cool. “Both Chris and I are design-conscious, so we had the design of the glove in mind when we were doing it,” Lairson told reporters.