Late last year I wrote, with childish and geekish joy, about onboard wifi on Virgin America. This year, on my first trip of the year to the US, I discovered another item which elicited the same reaction.
There’s some things that you expect to see when you’re on a plane somewhere over the Atlantic ocean. Firstly you expect to see a map of where you are …
Secondly, if you look out of the window, you expect to see the ocean below, through a gap in the clouds and through the ice crystals on the window …
But what you don’t expect to see, is a mobile phone which isn’t only not in flight safe mode, but is also actively connected to a mobile network.
But that’s what you get these days on Virgin Atlantic. Granted it’s a plain old GSM connection, voice calls and SMS only but it’s great for not feeling so isolated when you’re away from home and from family.
So not only will I maybe only write blog posts on from airplanes these days, but maybe I will only make phone calls from airplanes these days too.
Another Piece Of Bloggage By Gary
Self professed "geek with a life", geo-blogger, geo-talker and geo-tweeter, Gary works in London and Berlin as Director of the Places Registry for Nokia; he's a co-founder of WhereCamp EU, the chair of w3gconf and sits on the W3C POI Working Group and the UK Location User Group. A contributor to the Mapstraction mapping API, Gary speaks and presents at a wide range of conferences and events including Where 2.0, State of the Map, AGI GeoCommunity, Geo-Loco, Social-Loco, GeoMob, the BCS GeoSpatial SG and LocBiz. Writing as regularly as possible on location, place, maps and other facets of geography, Gary blogs at www.vicchi.org and tweets as @vicchi.
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