When was the last time you took a flight? How did you find the entertainment? Technology has changed a lot onboard aircrafts over the last few years. Nowadays, airlines have the ability to offer flyers hundreds of movies and TV shows. These software changes have been greatly improved towards offering passengers a better inflight experience. That said, the hardware has not changed so much over the last decade. Newer aircrafts are fine as they come with newer screens and enhanced onboard hardware. But on older aircrafts this is not always the case. Swapping software onboard is one thing but ripping all the hardware aspects out and then putting in new ones is far more complicated…not to mention costly. As a result, on a flight you might have taken recently the selection of content might have been great but you might have had to watch it on a screen smaller than your smartphone’s display.
Well, not a problem if you are flying with United Airlines anytime soon. UA have just announced that they are rolling out its ‘Personal Device Entertainment’ to android devices. This service was previously available in a beta mode but only for laptops and iOS. However, from today UA have included android into the service. This means that you will now be able to log in to the UA servers and watch all the offered programming and movies directly on your smartphone or tablet. Not bad huh! No matter what aircraft you are on, if you are sporting a 10.1 tablet then your screen will certainly be bigger than any the aircraft can offer you…at least in economy class. So this really is a good feature to take advantage of. United have advised that currently the service is available on two hundred of their aircrafts and will be further rolled out to all other UA aircrafts over the coming year.
If you are planning to use this service then you will need to download the United Airlines app. Its the app that allows you to log into their servers once onboard and for the content to be streamed over the onboard WiFi. Also, when booking a flight check under ‘Flight Amenities’ to find out if your route is covered by the Personal Device Entertainment service to make sure you can use your device. So what do you think of the new service? Will you be giving it a try?