One of the new features of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are their Home buttons. They’ve got “solid-state” Home buttons that vibrate using an internal Taptic Engine rather than actually clicking, and once winter rolls around, some iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus owners may have to get some special gloves to use their phones.
The Home buttons on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus require contact with skin or a capacitive surface in order to “click.” Because of this, iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus owners won’t be able to use the new Home button with regular gloves during the winter.
The good news is that there’s a plethora of gloves out there that have capacitive fingertips. They’ve actually existing for a while now, letting you operate your smartphone’s touchscreen while keeping your gloves on, and now you’ll need them if you want to use your new iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus’s home button with your gloves on, too.
I dug out my capacitive gloves to put the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus’s Home button to the test, and indeed, I was able to click the button.
If you’ve got an iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus but you don’t want to buy capacitive gloves to use your phone in cold weather, you do have a couple of other options. You can click in the power/lock button on the side of the phone to turn on the screen, or you can take advantage of the Raise to Wake feature found in iOS 10 that’ll turn on your phone’s screen when you pick it up off of a surface.
Do you have capacitive gloves to use with your smartphone?
