This is exactly the wrong time of year to be reviewing this product, but Google remembers, and maybe it'll help someone looking for iPod/iPhone/iPad compatible gloves come September or October. Or in the Southern Hempisphere or something.

I ride the El to work and so I've been intrigued by the idea of gloves that I could wear and still operate my iPhone -- waiting on the platform is valuable Words With Friends time, you know. But all of the ones I had seen achieved their touch-screen-ness with little metal grommets embedded in the fingertips. I'd be nervous tapping on my iPhone screen with little metal buttons, and it seems like they'd be sure to conduct heat rather efficiently away from fingertips. Not exactly what you'd want gloves to do.

At the Shamrock Shuffle Expo, a very bare booth caught my eye -- it was just a couple of racks of gloves and two ladies. The ladies were a mother and daughter team who designed the Telefingers gloves. The gloves are pretty sweet (hence this review). They've got some sort of magic white thread on the thumb and first two fingertips that really just works to allow you to operate the touch screen on an iPhone or iPod. The palm and remaining finger areas are covered with little silcone dots that are nice and grippy, so you don't have to worry about the device falling out of your hand (and actually made them nice driving gloves as well). They aren't the thickest gloves in the world, which I suppose is a trade-off to allow the flexibility to operate devices with any sort of precision. But I only noticed their thinness when I was in a biting wind right off the lake, and I'm not sure I've ever really had gloves that stand up to that sort of wind.

Right exactly now the Telefingers website seems to be down, but their Twitter account is recently active and hopefully they'll be back in business by the time we need gloves again.