Skip to main content

Magic Touch: Beartek Bluetooth-Enabled Gloves

Let’s say you’re blasting down the freeway on your Ducati, weaving through traffic as you pretend you’re a hybrid of James Dean and Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive – you know, your typical commute. Suddenly somebody calls you. At 120 mph, you realize that fishing your phone out of those skin-tight leather pants will probably spell your doom. Looks like you’ll just have to let it go to voicemail – unless of course you’ve got a pair of Beartek gloves.

These high-tech hand warmers give you the ability to control your smartphone via Bluetooth commands that you perform with your fingers. Each glove is outfitted with six contact points that are activated whenever you touch them with your thumb, thereby eliminating the need for you to whip your phone out to answer/decline phone calls or control your music. To be fair, none of this stuff is very useful unless you’re also rocking a pair of Bluetooth headphones, but if you’re going to invest in some terminator-style tech like this, you might as well go all-out.

Recommended Videos

Chances are good you’ve heard about these gloves before – the Kickstarter campaign that launched them got a fair amount of coverage on tech blogs last year. So why are we writing about them now? Because Blue Infusion Technologies has finally finished their first production run and is ready to ship the gloves to consumers this March. You can actually buy them now! Check out their site and you’ll find two different models of the glove, one for snowsports and another for motorsports. They’re both waterproof and extremely durable, but the Moto model features pre-curved fingers because it’s safe to assume you’ll be gripping either handlebars or a steering wheel while you use them.

Check out Blue Infusion’s site to get your hands on (or in) a pair.

Drew Prindle
Drew is our resident tech nerd. He’s spent most of his life trying to be James Bond, so naturally he’s developed an…
The best sci-fi shows streaming right now
From Lost to The Twilight Zone, these are the best sci-fi shows ever made
The cast of Lost.

Sci-fi television has been around since the earliest days of the medium, and it's evolved along with the rest of television. In every era, though, there have been great sci-fi shows that remind us of how well the genre can fit on television.

Great science fiction can reflect on the world we know, even as it expands our understanding of what's possible. Regardless of exactly what these shows are about, though, each of them tells their story in gripping fashion, taking full advantage of what TV is capable of.

Read more
‘The Brutalist’ director Brady Corbet says he’s made no money promoting the film
The director said that he makes more directing commercials than he does making movies.
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist

It can be wonderful to get nominated for a bunch of awards, but The Brutalist director Brady Corbet said that it's not exactly a profitable one. In an interview on WTF with Marc Maron, Corbet said that he hadn't actually made any money promoting the movie.

“This is the first time I’ve made any money in years,” Corbet said, saying that his first real paycheck in a long time came from directing three advertisements in Portugal. “Both my partner and I made zero dollars on the last two films we made. Yes, actually zero. So we had to just live off of a paycheck from three years ago and obviously, the timing during an awards campaign and travel every two or three days was less than ideal, but it was an opportunity that landed in my lap, and I jumped at it.”

Read more
John Malkovich said that he rejected Marvel movies prior to ‘Fantastic Four’ over low pay
He explained that Marvel movies took a lot of time, and he wanted to be paid accordingly.
John Malkovich in Fantastic Four

Over the course of its 15 years of existence, Marvel has lured a number of surprising actors into its orbit. We live in a world where Angelina Jolie and Harry Styles have both appeared in Marvel projects (actually the same one).

John Malkovich was one of the last Marvel holdouts, but that's changing with The Fantastic Four: First Steps. In an interview with GQ, Malkovich explained that he had been approached to do Marvel projects in the past, but had always turned them down.
“The reason I didn’t do them had nothing to do with any artistic considerations whatsoever,” Malkovich explained. “I didn’t like the deals they made, at all.”
He explained that he simply wanted more money to work through the conditions required to make a movie on this scale.
“These films are quite grueling to make…. If you’re going to hang from a crane in front of a green screen for six months, pay me. You don’t want to pay me, it’s cool, but then I don’t want to do it, because I’d rather be onstage, or be directing a play, or doing something else," he continued.
Malkovich is, perhaps unsurprisingly, playing villain Ivan Kragoff, also known as Red Ghost in the film. He explained that working on the movie was actually like stage work in some respects. "It’s not that dissimilar to doing theater,” he said, “You imagine a bunch of stuff that isn’t there and do your little play.”

Read more