Yesterday, Jeff dropped me off at the airport and I checked in, went through security and sat at the gate until my plane arrived. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the flight home, considering there were 30 or 40 little camp girls on my plane all going home. I wasn’t too happy about that. When we were called to board, I looked out the window and noticed that I was boarding the JetBlue BetaBlue aircraft, one of their planes that offers free email, shopping, and instant messaging services to it’s passengers above 10,000 feet. Maybe this trip won’t be so bad after all. I made my way to my seat and noticed a sticker on the seat in front of me that indicated there was a wireless signal.

We took off and before I knew it we were at cruising altitude. I turned on my iPod and opened Safari, where I was greeted with a page to log in to their network. I typed in my name, seat number, and email, and was directed to a page that said “Welcome to BetaBlue!”

I opened a new page in Safari and tried “mail.google.com/mail/”  for Gmail, which kept erroring for about 30 minutes and then finally decided to load. I also tried “mobile.live.com/hm/” for Hotmail which also loaded extremely slow. After another half hour of trying to send a message, I was able to send my mom an email on Hotmail, and one to Jeff on Gmail. Unfortunately, the service came to a screeching halt whenever we ventured over water, and I lost communication altogether.

It was fun to test out but, like anything in the Beta stage, it has a LONG way to go. Click here for more information about BetaBlue.