POC Nail Glove

Fit

The Nail, once on, feels like a great fit, and for me, at least, like a perfect custom fit. The fingers aren’t too long or too short. There isn’t a bunch of extra, loose material on the back or the front of the palm. Your experience may vary, of course, but for me, the glove feels precise, carefully calculated.

But…the cuff is a pretty narrow. The Nail is easy to pull off, but I find the narrow cuff to make it a bit of a chore to put on; I can’t do it super quickly. Once the glove is on, I don’t even notice the cuff; it isn’t too tight, it’s just snug, and it presents no problems. It feels good, in fact.

One solution would be to size up, I suppose, but I personally don’t need or want additional room around the rest of glove itself, especially since a bigger, looser fit will likely decrease dexterity.

So this might be the primary takeaway of this review: If you are mostly set-it-and-forget when it comes to gloves—you pretty much throw them on at the start of the day and leave them on till the end—then I can highly recommend these gloves.

But if you tend to take your gloves off and on a lot, the cuff of the Nail is too snug to make this your best option, especially if you tend to wear your gloves on the snug side—the cuff width will almost certainly be pretty tight on you.

I love these gloves and will continue to wear them, but since I am not a put-’em-on-and-leave-’em-on glove guy, I would love to have a Velcro closure on these guys for quicker on / off. That means that, for me, the POC Wrist Freeride is perhaps the better choice (it has a slightly longer, knitted cuff that permits for an easier on / off), though I had both gloves with me in Las Leñas and I continued to reach for the Nail because I really liked the fabric backing and the overall fit of the Nail. (I’ll put up a review of the POC Wrist Freeride once I get more time in them.)

I’m also eager to check out the POC Palm X—with its Velcro cuff—since it looks like the most direct comparison to my Ski Cross and Vertical Cut Freeride gloves.

Durability

I’ve worn the POC Nail glove for only ten days, which isn’t nearly enough time to weigh in here. All I can say is that, so far, everything is as it should be. The Nail shows no signs of wear, no tears in the fabric on the back or on the leather on the palm. In short, early indicators look very good.

Warmth

So far, so good. Riding around the resort in Las Leñas, my hands were never cold, whether it was snowing or whether the winds started fiercely howling as we were riding up Marte. Compared to my reference gloves, the Hestra Ski Cross and Vertical Cut Freeride, I, for one, didn’t find the Nail to be significantly less warm, but rather on par with my Hestras. (If pressed, I would say that the Vertical Cut Freeride is probably the best of the three gloves when temps are coldest, and the Nail is the best when temps are warmest. But the differences between “Best” and “Worst” here are subtle.)

Breathability

Nothing surprising to report here. The worst gloves don’t breathe well, cause your hands to start sweating, which then, in turn, causes your now-wet hands to freeze in cold temperatures. I had no such issues with the Nail.

When we were doing some long boot packs on very sunny, very warm days, my hands were definitely sweating—just as they would have been in my Ski Cross or Vertical Cut Freerides—and I should have been wearing just some very thin glove liners. So my hands were wet, but they never turned cold, which is all that you can ask when you start hiking around in a glove that’s too warm for the job.

Having said that, these were some seriously warm, spring-like conditions, and I consider the Nail to be as versatile as my Ski Cross gloves.

Dexterity

The dexterity of the Nail is good. I can’t say that I found them to be far more dexterous than my Ski Cross gloves, but the Nail is neck-and-neck in this regard to my reference gloves. I’d call it a tie.

Bottom Line

While I didn’t initially intend to do this, I ended up pitting this new Nail glove by POC against one of my favorite gloves, the Hestra Ski Cross. And after ten days, I can say that, so far, the Nail compares very, very favorably. The fit of the Nail is precise. I’m impressed with the temperature ranges that the Nail proved it could handle. Dexterity is good.

As I noted earlier, I think the biggest factor will be whether you take your gloves on and off a ton. If you don’t, then I highly recommend the Nail. And if you do, I think you might want to check out the POC Wrist Freeride or the POC Palm X. Either way, POC seems to have everybody covered.