Disposable hand warmers take twenty minutes to get going and then you throw them away. This one is warm in roughly three seconds and you charge it again afterwards, which is better on every count including the bin.
There are two temperature settings, so you can run it gentle for a long morning or turn it up when your hands have genuinely stopped working. You get around four hours on the lower setting and about three and a half on the higher one, which covers a cold dawn start or a full afternoon on a sideline.
When your hands are warm enough, it goes back to being a battery. It will put charge into a phone through a USB-A port, which makes it considerably easier to justify carrying than a device that only does one thing.
It weighs under 100 grams and is small enough to disappear into a coat pocket or a glove, so you are not making a trade-off between warm hands and a bulky pocket. It is rated IPX2, so it copes with a bit of drizzle, though it is not something to take swimming.
This suits campers doing winter trips, parents standing at junior sport, fishers, early-shift workers, snow holidays and anyone with poor circulation who has quietly given up on gloves. It is a small present that gets used constantly for several months of the year.
Charge it before you wrap it, because the first thing anyone does is hold it and wait. If you are buying for someone heading somewhere genuinely cold, two is not excessive, since one in each pocket is how most people end up using them.
✔ Warms in around three seconds with two heat settings
✔ About 4 hours on low and 3.5 hours on high
✔ Doubles as a USB power bank for your phone
✔ Under 100 g, small enough for a pocket or glove
✔ IPX2 rated and recharged rather than thrown away
