Reviews by User: Anthony Guselnikov (3)

I'm becoming convinced that putting together a decent piece of electronics is too big of a task for Burton R&D. Having tried all their Audex jackets (starting with MD in 2002), I can definitively say that they all fail in the simple task of controlling IPod on the slopes. Mind you, a $3 IPod remote does it splendidly (vs $100 premium they charge for their 'solution'). This particular one suffers from the following defects: - Any kind of of bending on the slopes will trigger buttons on remote. Strapping in/out, landing a jump, laying a tight carve. It'd seem this was not tested by anything close to a real snowboarder. - At random intervals this remote will mess with IPod "repeat" settings putting it into "Repeat one song" mode requiring disconnecting it and fixing the problem basically manually. As a standalone jacket it's not fantastic either - the fabric inside the pockets seems to suffer from over-abundance of material resulting in zipper getting stuck on a constant basis. Gets 2 for warmth.

First the good: the jacket itself is fairly warm.. The material feels somewhat like a cross between Gore-Tex and Burton earlier Storm-lites. All in all a very solid snowboarding jacket. The bad: Bluetooth connectivity could be better. The phone periodically pops in and out, sometimes it won't connect to it until you place a phone call from the phone. (Isn't the point of the jacket to make sure I don't have to reach for the phone?) The ugly: IPod functionality is worse than on any other Burton jacket I've dealt with in the past (Burton AMP, Burton Ronin IPod, Burton IPod Shield). The screen is surely a nice feature, but the speed with which you can browse through lists and songs is dreadfully slow which somewhat negates it's usefulness. It almost seems like there is a mandatory delay built in. If you use the phone the audio will sometimes not engage until the phone is used - weird bug. However, all of this could be somewhat overlooked if it weren't for the biggest problem that this jacket - it doesn't wake IPod up. As everyone knows when you place IPod on pause after a minute or so it goes into standby. Any action (volume, play, next) will bring it out of standby. Any and all IPod remotes out there do that. My old Burton IPod shield with Softswitch does that. Not this jacket. After IPod goes to sleep the jacket counts it as "disappeared" and I have to pull the IPod out and turn it on manually. It's so bad I connect the ipod remote to the IPod and place it on the outside of the jacket just for the purpose of bringing it out of standbys.

First of all, let me get the positives out of the way. These gloves will probably keep your hands warm and dry on your cold dead body in the midst of Antarctica while somebody pours liquid nitrogen down your throat. It seems the 3 layers are immune to penetration. This may very well be the gloves ultimate downfall. Three layers of insulation make it very hard to take them on and off. Especially in my case - I use snowboarding wrist gloves at all times, the only way I found I can fit them is by removing the 2nd layer, and wearing Gore-Tex inserts (1st layer), which makes for some weird feeling of emptiness inside the gloves. All in all, I'd say that if you are hardcore backcountry snowboarder and you don't use wrist gloves - look no further. Otherwise, you might want to look at other gloves.