Woollen Smartphone Gloves
A novelty innovation a couple of years ago is now almost a winter wardrobe essential: gloves you can use with your touchscreen phone or tablet. Most of these use changes in capacitance as your conductive finger meets the screen to register a touch. Regular gloves act as electrical insulators, so they don’t work. These 92 per cent lambswool gloves feel traditionally cosy, but have a conductive thread woven in. They come in two sizes.
Woollen Smartphone Gloves, £20 (€24.70), from fab.com
Sigg Active Top Bottles
Sigg can be a generic term for a water bottle, it’s so ubiquitous a brand. Surprisingly, it has had something of a march stolen on it, by rivals like Contigo. But now, with a new no-leak top that’s more practical – you don’t have to tilt back the bottle to drink – it can handle carbonated beverages thanks to a venting system, and you can control the flow as you sip away.
Sigg Active Top Bottles, from €20. Available soon from outdoors stores or at sigg.com
Folbot Citibot Foldable Kayak
Folbot was set up in 1933 to make folding boats. Who'd have thought there was market? The Citibot is its lightest (11kg /24lb). It folds into a backpack-sized bag to be reassembled into a three metre kayak. Flotbot's not-so-secret secret is that you make up the boat's steel and aircraft grade aluminium frame initially and only stretch it to its full extent when it's inside the kayak skin. This is made from Hypalon, a super-tough synthetic rubber often used in whitewater rafts. It comes in a range of colours and you can customise it with a photo. Folbot Citibot Foldable Kayak $1,200 from folbot.com