Photos coming soon. I'm still working on this and have posted it incomplete so that people on Kickstarter can see that the GAMMA jacket exists and I have received it.
I recently received my GAMMA jacket which I supported on Kickstarter (which was a big risk after one of my other recent Kickstarter purchases, the Dawn Backpack, ended up a scam and I lost about £100) and it was an exciting new purchase for me. As my readers will know, I tend to only review technology, but this jacket is something quite special so I'm going to try and review it here. I will point out, I was also an early backer on Kickstarter. This will likely be the shortest review that you'll ever come across on my website, since there's not much I can say about a jacket.
There had been times throughout the lifetime of GAMMA that I thought that I had been scammed again, but in reality, I had a lot more faith in the creators of it than I did in the Dawn Backpack creators, who just seemed to be interested in making money from me. But I held on and on, and received it in December of last year.
Why is this jacket so special?
As a tech geek, I was very interested in a few things with this jacket. Let's start with the obvious. Graphene! Graphene has been a revolutionary material in so many fields and it was really interesting to see it coming to clothing. After reading a bit about what made GAMMA special, it became clear it was possible that this jacket may be a good replacement or supplement to my M&S Thinsulate jacket (it's not replaced it by the way) as a lightweight yet warm jacket.
The other thing that really excited me was the inclusion of the built-in heating elements. This means that the jacket can take advantage of a USB battery bank to provide heat. What's really great is the jacket is actually machine washable, even with this heating element built in.
The jacket does keep you warm in the cold weather that we've experienced this year in the UK but on those occasional sunny days is not too heavy to wear and is definitely a breathable jacket.
This jacket features tons of pockets. There two front zipper pockets, two pouch pockets, two inner pockets and a pocket on the right arm for store cards.
The jacket also features fingerless gloves built-in to the sleeves which is really awesome for me when I go out cycling, and allows you to open the sides to let air in.
Criticisms
This jacket is great, but it's expensive. This has to be the main criticism I have of this jacket. I even managed to get early bird pricing on mine but still found it's price tag quite hefty. Next, I've got to point out that the zippers on it aren't fab. They often jam and are also difficult to close sometimes (though they are nice when they do clip together, and I love the looks of the zippers).
I'm a bit weary about washing this jacket since I'm not sure how many washes it will be able to take and there is no indication of this either. Since graphene is a new type of material for jackets, it's not been fully tested and checked to see how well it gets washed.
Update after using for several months
I bought this jacket with the intention of being my jacket for everything. But it's far from that. After using it for several months in wet weather etc, the heating elements no longer heat me as they used to. The jacket is still comfortable to wear still fairly functional, but in hindsight, I would not have bought this expensive jacket that doesn't do half of what it was meant to.
