The best touchscreen gloves we tested
Best touchscreen gloves: The North Face Etip Recycled Gloves
Best budget touchscreen gloves: Achiou Winter Knit Gloves
Best extra-warm touchscreen gloves: Canada Goose Workman Gloves
A great pair of touchscreen gloves can help you easily manipulate your smartphone or e-reader while keeping your hands warm while outdoors this winter. Touchscreen gloves are different from other winter gloves or heated gloves in that they have a special material on the tips of one or more fingers that is responsive to tablet or smartphone screens and allows you to scroll or type while wearing them.
Finding a good pair of touchscreen gloves is no simple matter. Appropriate fit and adequate warmth are already hard enough to get right in a pair of gloves and adding reliable touchscreen capabilities further complicates this.
To help you find the best touchscreen gloves so you can keep using your smartphone, tablet or other electronics while wearing them, I reviewed 10 pairs of gloves over several months to see if any could pass muster during a cool autumn and the frigid days of winter in Chicago. I found three pairs that outperformed the rest.
With a huge range of styles and quite a few different iterations, The North Face Etip Recycled Gloves made it easy to find a good pair that kept my hands warm and typing.
The Achiou Winter Knit Gloves are a compelling, low-cost option for moderate weather. They fit nice and snug on my hands, and are exceptionally good at letting me interface with a touchscreen.
When the temperature plummets, the Canada Goose Workman Gloves still let me work well with touchscreens. I know their price is an indulgence for those on a budget, but I think their exceptional insulation is worth the spend.
Best touchscreen gloves: The North Face Etip Recycled Gloves
The North Face Etip Recycled Gloves knock it out of the park for touchscreen functionality. Of all the gloves I tested for this guide, only Achiou’s could match the North Face Etip Recycled Gloves gloves for accuracy and responsiveness on a touchscreen — but North Face’s Etip gloves are just warmer.
Some gloves do a decent job at letting me type by pecking away with the tip of my index finger, but the Etip gloves excel at this, even allowing accurate typing with my thumbs, almost like I am not wearing gloves at all. These are great fall gloves, offering a thin buffer between my hands and the cool air. They even hold up well while I bike in cool, 50-degree Fahrenheit weather. They are a little thin and lack insulation for long-term use in cold weather, but they do the job if I only intermittently need to take my hands out of my pocket for brief use of my phone.
The North Face has a real winner with its Etip Recycled Gloves, and I could find a whole assortment of different versions of this glove, with slightly different constructions. There are also various sizes and color options to choose from, so it’s easy to find something that fits your hands and your tastes.
In my experience, the gloves fit well, with little bunching or extra bulk around my fingers to limit dexterity. It is important to get the right size, though, as the wrist of the glove isn’t incredibly stretchy and may make it hard to get the glove off and on.
Best budget touchscreen gloves: Achiou Winter Gloves
If you plan on tackling the occasional cool autumn day and want a cheap pair of gloves to help you retain a little extra heat in your hands, then the Achiou Winter Knit Gloves can do the job. They formed an excellent fit around my hands thanks to their highly stretchy knit fabric and are a great example of something “fitting like a glove.”
That conforming fit is also essential to their touchscreen capability. With such a snug fit around my fingertips, it is a breeze for me to tap away on a touchscreen with them on. Almost none of the other gloves I tested feel as close to simply using a phone barehanded as Achiou’s do.
The Achiou Winter Knit Gloves go a little beyond the basics for a cheap glove, adding rubbery strips along the palm and fingers to give me a better grip. With all this in mind, I don’t plan on wearing the Achiou Winter Knit Gloves into the deep of winter, where freezing temps and biting winds will easily penetrate its thin weave. These are cool-weather gloves, not cold-weather gloves. In freezing temps, they hardly feel like they offer my hands any warmth, and the wind that comes from when I ride a bike or scooter in even 50-degree weather leaves them feeling weak.
Best extra-warm touchscreen gloves: Canada Goose Workman Glove
There’s no getting around it: the more insulation a glove offers, the thicker it gets and the thicker it gets, the worse its touchscreen reliability is. Most of the thicker gloves I tested are spotty about touchscreen taps and many had me precariously pecking with the tip of my index finger. Others pulled the glove extra tight around that fingertip which was an awkward design.
The Canada Goose Workman Gloves, however, are the one pair of gloves that buck the trend slightly, offering a snug fit around my fingertips that makes poking at my screens more reliable. The experience is still not as seamless as my other two recommendations, as they do require a little care with taps and are effectively worthless for thumb typing. But where the other gloves may excel for touchscreen functionality, the Canada Goose Workman Gloves have them thoroughly beaten for warmth.
These gloves were the only pair I tested that held up to the chill of freezing winter winds. While walking in the cold, the Canada Goose Workman Gloves effectively kept my hands and fingers warm. When riding my bike in these same temps, the leather and insulation combined to offer a protective shell that keeps my hands from freezing.
While they can handle low 30s temperatures, that’s about the point the protection starts to meet its match. They may do for walking in the teens but if there’s significant wind, you may have to forgo using your phone and opt for a good pair of mittens.
How we tested
To test the best touchscreen gloves, I called in 10 pairs of popular and recommended touchscreen gloves; they have varying degrees of touch capabilities and fall within a few different price and insulation levels. I tested each pair in various conditions, from cool temps around 50 degrees Fahrenheit to freezing temps under 30 degrees Fahrenheit. My testing scenarios included the following
- Real-world scenario tests: My testing included walking, riding a scooter and biking to observe performance in likely real-world use cases. I evaluated the gloves’ warmth in these conditions.
- Typing tests: I further assessed each glove’s effectiveness with touchscreens, grading them based on their performance tapping on-screen buttons, typing with my index finger, and typing with my thumbs.
- Overall effectiveness: With warmth, comfort, and touchscreen compatibility all considered, I landed on a few standout options.
Other touchscreen gloves we tested
I think Carhartt’s C-Touch Knit Gloves are a fairly standard winter glove. They have a boxy exterior and a loose inner lining and are an adequate option.
The Carhartt C-Touch Knit Gloves offer a bit of warmth, though less than I would have expected from a pair of gloves this bulky. The flip side of that bulk is that they’re incredibly unreliable for touchscreen use. They interface with touchscreens but it was incredibly hard for me to accurately touch anything on the screen that’s not a huge button. This pretty much rules them out as useful touchscreen gloves.
The Glider Gloves are an OK option for mild weather but I think there are better options on this list.
The Glider Gloves gloves don’t offer much insulation compared to Achiou’s option. They give me fairly accurate typing with my index fingers and thumbs, but not quite on the level of the Achiou gloves. The weave of the Glider Gloves doesn’t conform as well to my hand and fingers, leaving some bunching and loose areas that impact my comfort and typing.
The Moshi Digits Gloves are a fairly average pair of gloves all around but there are better options, like The North Face Etip gloves.
The Moshi Digits Gloves offer me a little more warmth than some of the thinner, knit gloves but not by much. The weave of the Moshi Digits does little to block wind, which can quickly make it feel like I don’t have gloves on at all. And while they’re moderately accurate at touchscreen typing, they aren’t as accurate as thinner gloves. The North Face’s Etip gloves offer me similar warmth and better typing.
Outdoor Research has a decent option with its Flurry Sensor Gloves. They’re a knit pair of gloves, with a thicker weave than lots of the other options I tested.
The thick weave of the Outdoor Research Flurry Sensor Gloves makes them a little bulky and prone to piling on the outside of the glove. But they are one of the warmer options in my testing — enough for me to bike comfortably in 50-degree Fahrenheit weather. They are also fairly comfortable. The downside to the stiffer and thicker design is that they’re not great for me to use with a touchscreen. The thickness also makes it a little harder to hold onto my phone.
A cheap pair of lined leather gloves, the Warmen Mens’ Leather Driving Gloves have some style and insulation, but not much value as touchscreen gloves.
The thin leather and lining of the Warmen Men’s Leather Driving Gloves don’t hold up to the cold, even if they block the wind. Despite that thinness, they’re not great for typing as my thumbs were useless when I wore them. My index fingers were OK at typing but served me better as a means for just pressing whatever button turns on voice typing. Simply put, these gloves don’t hold up to The North Face’s Etip gloves.
I tested the Warmen Mens’ Leather Driving Gloves and Warmen makes a slightly different pair of leather touchscreen gloves for women, which I tested too. The women’s gloves are stylish but don’t make up for the shortcomings of the men’s gloves.
I think the Warmen Winter Gloves for Women are not as warm as others I tested and their touch sensitivity is inconsistent. While they may look more stylish, they didn’t offer me as much warmth or touchscreen accuracy as The North Face Etip gloves.
The Ozero Women’s Leather Winter Gloves may be affordable and stylish, but I do not recommend them. Go with The North Face or Achiou gloves instead.
The Ozero Women’s Leather Winter Gloves have a comfortable lining and offer reasonable warmth. However, their touchscreen functionality is incredibly unreliable. If you’re just after a simple pair of gloves, these may be good for your needs. But if you want touchscreen gloves, these aren’t it.
FAQs
Why trust CNN Underscored
CNN Underscored editors thoroughly test all the products we cover and provide full transparency about how we test them. We have an experienced team of writers and editors with many years of testing experience and ensure each article is carefully edited and products are properly vetted. We talk to top experts when it makes sense to ensure we are testing each product accurately and speaking about the pros and cons of each item.
For this guide, writer Mark Knapp spent months in the cold testing different pairs of touchscreen gloves to see which ones performed best. Knapp has done extensive testing in other areas for CNN Underscored, including writing our guides to the best bike locks, the best computer monitors and the best MagSafe battery packs.
