What You Can and Cannot Do with an iPhone on an Airplane

Traveling to Nashville on Sunday I had a chance to experiment with what the iPhone can and cannot do in airplane mode. Here’s my list in iPhone Dock (main screen) order:

SMS: I can read prior messages but cannot reply while in airplane mode. I tried queuing up a message thinking I could send the next time I got a connection. After entering my message and hitting send while still in airplane mode I got “Error Sending Message” which kicked me back to the message reply screen.

Calendar: I am not using the iPhone Dock calendar but it appears to work. Mike Q is using Gsync to two-way sync his Google calendar with iCal on his MacBook. This then syncs with the iPhone calendar. I had tried GSync before and had some issues with it and ended up using Calgoo. I believe I can do something similar with Calgoo and will work on this week when I get a few minutes. I'll also take another look at Gsync.

Photos: I can view all of my photos stored locally on the iPhone.

YouTube: Does not work and produces message “You must disable airplane mode to access data” and displays a Cancel and Disable button.

Stocks: Same response as YouTube.

Maps: Same response as YouTube. I did have a map of Nashville that was still displayed from my last connection. I could pinch zoom the map.

Weather: Same response as YouTube. I could flick through all of my city listings. They displayed the weather from the last time I had a live connection and got an update.

Clock, Calculator and Notes: All work fine.

iTunes: Does not work and requires a WiFi connection. iTunes also does not work with just an EDGE (cellular network) connection.

Phone: I can access all of my contacts, add, make changes, etc. I could also listen to voice mail.

Email: I could read messages that were stored on the iPhone the last time I had a connection. I could also reply to any messages – they went into the outbox and were sent the next time I got a connection.

Safari: If I did not power the iPhone off the web browser allowed me to view sites I had looked at and left open the last time I had a connection. The sites did go away when I powered the device off and on.

Overall Impressions
Email works great and I love the ability to listen to voice mail without having a connection. Not being able to access my favorite Mockdock applications, including Engadget, Digg, Chess, Bejeweled and especially Google Reader (that I use to read RSS feeds I subscribe to) is disappointing. I’ve got to do some research on Google Gears and determine whether I can get the feeds offline. I’m looking forward, with the release of the iPhone SDK, to applications that run off the main Dock. And… yes – I realize I could have just put the iPhone in airplane mode to run these tests – I did not have to get on an airplane!

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