Tag Archive for 'Gadgets'

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Virgin and AA to Launch Wi-Fi Broadband Inflight

Published on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 in General and News. 0 Comments Tags: AA, American Airlines, Flights, Gadgets, Internet, Planes, Virgin, Wireless.

I spotted via Boing Boing that American Airlines (AA) are about to test out wireless Internet onboard planes, with the finished product aimed to be available in six months time. Virgin also have plans in the pipeline, which aim to be brought in shortly afterwards.

Browsing inflight

Both airlines will be using Aircell’s ‘Gogo‘ technology, which will allow passengers to connect to the Internet whilst flying. This won’t be limited to simply laptops, all applications will be able to connect. So whether you want to check the weather on your iPhone or play PSP Socom online, the options are there.

The service begins testing tomorrow in the US and once launched, is expected to cost between $10 and $13 to use on long flights. This runs in sync with Ryan-air’s recently announced service to allow texting, GRPS and voice calls via OnAir‘s satellite technology.

I always just assumed the reason we hadn’t seen these kind of services commercially was because it was too dangerous and may interfere with flight controls, but I guess not. I think that it could quite radically change how boring flights usually are. For too long I’ve had to think ahead and make sure my laptop is packed with enough decent material to keep me occupied in the air. Soon I won’t have to bother, I can just browse and download at leisure. Naturally though, cost is going to paramount to its success.

Feedbooks Makes Travelling Readers Happy

Published on Wednesday, June 25, 2008 in General. 0 Comments Tags: Gadgets, Long Journeys, Mobile Phones, Reading.

Books can both be big and heavy. Especially when they come in numbers. I’ve just come across this excellent website Feedbooks which aims to create a universal e-paper platform. This means that no matter what electronic device you use for reading, Feedbooks can deliver you free content with the further possibility of customised newspapers generated through RSS and widgets.

Feedbooks Platforms

So for example, if you’re taking that Trans-Mongolian train across Russia that I’ve previously talked about, then this sort of thing would be ideal. If you read a lot of books, you can grab a bunch of books and transfer them to your mobile for easy-reading. Maybe you’ve always wanted to get around to reading 1984. You go to the 1984 Feedbooks page and simply download the book in your file of choice. Better yet – it’s free!

Okay, so reading books on mobiles isn’t that new. Another feature of Feedbooks though, is pretty new. If you use a feed aggregator to keep on top of all the sites and blogs that you read, then you might find Feedbooks useful. You can generate your own custom newspaper and download it as a file (eg PDF) for reading at your own leisure.

So all you have to imagine really, is taking all of the latest content from the sites you read and having it automatically placed inside a mobile-friendly file. The one thing I would suggest when using this feature is to only really use feeds which offer full content. Some feeds snip the content just to give you a taste of what’s inside. It would be pretty pointless to grab info that’s just one or two lines.

I think it’s a really great idea, that’s useful for long journeys. It can cost a lot of money, depending on your service provider, to subscribe to RSS via an mobile device. With Feedbooks, you could get up in the morning, grab a PDF of all the sites you read, stick it on your PDA for reading on the train. It’s still in beta at the moment, so you’ll have to be patient with fixes and updates, but it’s well worth checking out Feedbooks’ RSS to PDF feature.