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Flying with Devices
A lot of people hit the road or the skies during the summer for vacation getaways. With your iPhone, iPad, your kid’s iPad and maybe an Apple Watch, too, how do you handle your digital devices in the air? Since 2013, we’ve been able to use handheld electronic devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and Kindle at pretty much all times during airplane flights, including takeoff and landing. That was a big change from previous FAA policy, which banned the use of personal electronic devices below 10,000 feet, forcing passengers to occupy themselves with books and magazines at the start and end of flights.
But now flight attendants ask us to put our devices into “airplane mode.” You probably know how to do this on your iOS device, but if not, here’s how. Swipe up from the bottom of the screen to bring up Control Center, and tap the Airplane Mode button at the top left. Or open the Settings app and enable the Airplane Mode switch that’s the very first option. When you land, use the same controls to turn it off again.
What does airplane mode do? It disables the wireless features of your device to comply with airline regulations. Specifically, it turns off the cellular voice and data features of your iPhone or iPad, and on all iOS devices it turns off both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. However, only the cellular features are important to your airline—you can re-enable both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth at any time. That might be useful if you want to use the airplane’s really expensive Wi-Fi network for internet access or Bluetooth to play music over wireless headphones.
To turn these wireless features back on, tap the grayed-out Wi-Fi and Bluetooth buttons in Control Center, or flip their switches in Settings > Wi-Fi and Settings > Bluetooth. Don’t bother turning them on unless you’re going to use them, though, since you’ll save a little battery life by leaving them off for the duration of a long flight.
Why do the airlines care about cellular? It has little to do with airplane safety; the prohibition on their use comes from the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, not the Federal Aviation Administration. The reason is that fast-moving cell phones used high in the air may light up many cell towers at once, which can confuse the mobile phone network.
The technical solution is akin to what the airlines do to provide Internet access now; a device called a “picocell” would be installed on the airplane to provide connectivity with the phone network, and cell phones on the plane would communicate with it instead of individual cell towers on the ground below. Will it happen, though?
The FCC has proposed that it would allow cell phone use on properly equipped planes; however, the thought of fellow passengers having phone conversations during flight makes me want to walk instead! Many lawmakers in the United States oppose allowing passengers to make and receive phone calls during flight, citing concerns about cabin safety, a worry echoed by the flight attendants union. Even FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has acknowledged this, saying “I get it. I don’t want the person in the seat next to me yapping at 35,000 feet any more than anyone else.” So, thankfully, I don’t expect that rule to change. Remember the phones that were in seat backs for years on planes? Hapy and I had a company rule that if any employees called from an airplane they would be immediately fired. It CAN wait.
If you’re allowed to use Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, why do the airlines make me stow my MacBook Air during takeoff and landing? It has nothing to do with the technology—the airlines ban laptops during times when there could be an emergency landing because they could, like carry-on luggage or lowered tray tables, impede evacuation.
Adding Utility to Live Photos
When I was in high school I used to make movies with my friends. In one of the movies my friend asked if he could just rant in front of a camera for a few minutes. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember everything he ranted about, but one of the things was definitely Apple. It was more than a little ironic given that we were using an iMac and Final Cut Pro to edit and master the movie.
Without dating myself, it’s been a while since I was in high school, but my friend and I still keep in touch, and he still complains about Apple a lot. I got quite the earful when I told him I got my first iPhone back in January. He was telling me how much he liked his Samsung Galaxy and all of the ways in which it was a superior device to my iPhone.
I did laugh quite a bit when he texted me recently to say even he was getting an iPhone now because his company was deploying them. Now I’ve been trying to show him how to do things and occasionally get him riled up by waxing poetic about how great Apple is in an over-the-top, comical way.
Having friends with a different kinds of smartphones can be a little lame, because of all of the features you can’t take advantage of in Messages and other apps. Heck, even my friend with the iPhone refuses to use iMessage and just forces his phone to send via plain SMS. Google apparently wanted to remedy at least a piece of the incompatibility when it comes to sharing live photos from iOS to other places by creating an app. The app, called Motion Stills, taps into your photos library and lets you convert a live photo to an animated GIF. You can even stitch several live photos together to make one long GIF. These can then be shared with any device that can play animated GIFs (pretty much everything at this point). You can even email them, save them, post them on social media, whatever you want! Heads up though that GIFs can become HUGE really quickly. I used an online GIF optimizer tool to help reduce the size of the images in this article.
I’ll admit that at first, I thought live photos were kind of gimmicky, and I was sure I’d just end up turning the feature off. I did for a while, but now I like having it as an option. For the most part, all I ever care about is the static picture I took, but I like the depth it adds to see it moving. I recently took a picture of myself on a mountain top, and I like how I can see how windy it was with everything blowing around in the live photo. It’s very cool to see third-party apps like Motion Stills stepping in to add to the utility of live photos. Now I can share them with all of my non-iPhone friends.