If you go on a flight from American Airlines in the near future you might be offered a free drink, a headset to listen to an in-flight movie or perhaps even a Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. Samsung has just announced that its newly launched 10.1 inch screen version of its Galaxy Tab tablet device has been picked up by American Airlines. The press release states that 6,000 of the tablets have been bought by the airline and will be given to passengers on select flights later this year.
The tablets will mainly be used for transcontinental flights for passengers on flights between New York’s JFK and Los Angeles, JFK and San Francisco, Los Angeles and Boston and Miami and Los Angeles. It will also be used on flights to and from Europe and South America.
The Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablets will replace a previous "personal entertainment device" on those flights in the premium cabin. American Airlines is the first US airline to offer a tablet based device for passengers to use for entertainment. The AA version of the Galaxy Tab will have some special modifications, including additional memory. Currently you can only buy the WiFi enabled Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet at the Best Buy store in New York City"s Union Square. On Friday, June 17 it will be released nationwide.
A couple of weeks ago Alaska Airlines announced that its pilots would be ditching its heavy and old fashioned print flight manuals for PDFs loaded onto Apple"s iPad 2 tablet.