By Carson Cheung, posted Jan 1, 2013 at 3:08 PM, 574 views,

Chinese Smartphone Users Feel it’s Like Magic While Using Touchscreen Gloves

As the weather gets colder in northern China, Chinese smartphone users are beginning to worry about how to operate their touchscreen devices without taking off their gloves during winter. Touchscreen gloves just pop up in time and becomes the most popular accessories right now. For the past Christmas, touchscreen gloves sell like hot cakes in China. You can find it almost everywhere, online stores, accessories shops and supermarkets, and the total monthly sales has gone sky high. The price of the gloves range from 9.9 yuan to 129 yuan (US$1.60-20.70), depend on design and what type of materials are made of, buyers are mostly youngsters. They gave favorable comments online, by saying: “I can really use the touchscreen after putting on this ! It’s magic !” China now is not only the largest market for smartphone, but also the largest market for smartphone’s accessories. Dealers can earn more profit by just selling accessories …

Smartphone users who live in extreme cold weather in China, fall in love with these touchscreen gloves. It’s not only for the protection, most importantly it will give the ability to operate their touchscreen devices. So is it really that magical ? As we know, capacitive touchscreen devices such as smartphones and tablets, consists of an insulator such as glass, coated with a transparent conductor. As the human body is also an electrical conductor, touching the surface of the screen results in a distortion of the screen’s electrostatic field, measurable as a change in capacitance. One cannot use a capacitive touchscreen through most types of electrically insulating material, such as gloves. This disadvantage especially affects usability in consumer electronics in cold weather. It can be overcome with a special glove with an embroidered patch of conductive thread passing through it and contacting the user’s fingertip.

SOURCE: life.longhoo.net (Chinese content), Wikipedia