Farkle Fingers - Text with your gloves on

Most of us have a smartphone these days. Not only do they enable you to stay completely in touch, but for those of you with an iphone you can also get the ESR App to take with you.

However, there is a problem with those lovely touchscreens: You have to keep taking your gloves off to use them. The obvious solution is to not wear gloves, but that's not something I would ever consider.

The reason gloves don't work is that they are not conductive whereas your fingers are. When your glove touches the screen, there's simply not enough conductivity to complete the circuit. There is a solution however, from the people at Adaptive Tech and it's called Farkle Fingers.

The premise is simple - it's a set of four sleeves that slip over your thumb and fingers. Half of the sleeve is regular Nylon, whilst the other half is woven from a conductive thread. The opening is elasticated (and quite narrow), and the inside is partially coated in a latex-like rubber so it grips your glove. There's also a small elastic tab to help you pull them on.

Given the range of riding I do, I've been using this for the past couple of weeks with three different pairs of gloves and I'll cover them all:

Tourmaster heated gloves

These are my go-to winter leather gloves and thus the ones I've been wearing most in the past couple of weeks. The heating is fantastic, but they're pretty big and bulky. As you can expect, getting them on your gloves is very tricky. Very tricky. It took me about five minutes to get them onto my glove. I did also try putting them on whilst I wasn't wearing the glove but they have a tendency to pop off when you put the glove on.

Given the struggle, I would have expected them to stay on the gloves very well, but that wasn't the case and they fell off at least once. To be fair, it wasn't during riding, or even using the fingers, but reaching into my pocket for my phone. As I swiped my iPhone, I realized the farkle finger was on the floor.

Knox Handroid

These are my more normal daily leather riding gloves. The protection is excellent and the Farkle Finger actually extends over the little rubber spines that run along the finger.

As the fingers on these gloves are narrower, the product was also easier to put on. I also found it didn't slip off at all, which I think is due to a less uniform finger tip compared with the Tourmaster.

Alpinestars SP-X

These are my light-weight gloves that I typically only wear in a severe heatwave. They're acutally suede, though there are little leather patches on the back of the finger, along with rubber insets that I'm sure would do nothing if I landed on them. Look good though.

As you might expect, the Farkle Fingers were easiest to apply using these gloves. As with the Handroids, they felt very secure and didn't come loose. This is probably due to the suede and rubber insets on the rubberized inserts.

How are they to use?

This is perhaps the only thing that really matters, and I have to say, they're not that bad. Typing is reasonably accurate in them provided you've a light touch. A firm touch puts too much of the "pad" down and simply presses too much of the screen.

They're certainly not useful for playing games, but then who has time for that? I mention this as it's a good indicator of how fine your control can be. The answer is not very. Pinch to zoom on a map, for example, was very difficult. Even trying to use one finger on each hand gave inconsistent results, but keep it to a single finger and they're more than acceptable. Making a phone call, for example, was pretty simple.

Summary

Not everyone is a phone junkie like me, but for those of you who are, this is a pretty decent product. As you might expect, it's not as accurate as bare fingers, but for the odd "press to answer" a call, or "tap" to read a message, these are a pretty good bet.

Warning: In NO way do we recommend you use your phone whilst riding. We didn't whilst testing this product, and to do so is not only dangerous but possibly illegal depending on where you live.