

Airplane Mode - flapjack
http://minimalmac.com/post/3165411533/airplane-mode

======
corin_
I've read this three times now on the assumption that its point was going over
my head - I'm now fairly sure it's not.

The lesson I've learned is not to turn my phone off, in case I want to show
someone pictures stored on it.

~~~
kenjackson
Read it again. The real message is when meeting with a friend you haven't seen
in a while, make sure you set it up so you get a lot of calls, emails, and
texts. Then when you go to airplane mode you seem super important, yet
considerate.

And then when you go home, make sure to thank your mom for the messages.

~~~
T_S_
There's a business opportunity here: Make me look busy. Now somebody tell me
its already been done.

~~~
wdewind
It has already been done. I can't remember exactly, but I believe a Samsung
phone came out in Korea recently that lets you hold a button on the side that
fakes a phone call to you. No iPhone app yet though.

Edit: screen shot of the samsung manual (apparently this is a feature on a lot
of their phones): <http://craphound.com/images/e7KOe.jpg>

~~~
Splines
Of course, now that it's a standard feature everyone is going to wonder if you
_really_ had a phone call.

------
spitfire
The nokia E-series E72 has the neatest feature. If you put it face down it
silences all alarts. Nokia had a great ad campaign for real face time using
this - "Somethings are more important than email".

The iphone and android badly need these features.

~~~
lmz
HTC has a feature like that for its "HTC Sense" phones.

From <http://www.htc.com/www/htcsense/index.html> :

"Ever fumbled with your phone because it went off at full-blast during a
meeting? Well, don't worry! Now as soon as you lift your phone up to see who's
calling, the ringer volume gets lower. Want it silenced completely? Just flip
it over."

~~~
bmelton
There used to be an Android app that did that. Though I can't remember the
name of it, it was incredibly handy.

I lost it at some point and, not remembering the app name, have failed to re-
download it.

~~~
khafra
I think Locale is supposed to do that, but I don't have an android device.

------
run4yourlives
_My first thought was, wow, what a show of respect for me and our time
together._

It saddens me that not being a rude ass is somehow worthy of blog-post out of
the ordinary praise these days.

~~~
adnam
And then get >200 points on HN

------
T_S_
Why are people always feeling "honored and humbled" these days? I think they
must be confused. Just feel honored and get on with your day.

~~~
spitfire
People aren't. Obnoxious bloggers are. and this guy is particularly bad.

~~~
callahad
That's the surprising thing -- Patrick's an exceptionally nice guy in person,
but his social-media wankery is, for whatever reason, completely insufferable
to me. Especially when he's overtly gunning to claim Gruber's pulpit. In that
way, he's much like Zed Shaw from the Zed's So Fucking Awesome days: A kind,
down-to-earth guy with a strangely abrasive online persona.

Citation: I attended undergrad at Patrick's last employer, and worked
indirectly with him in IT Services for a year. He really is fantastic in
person.

~~~
T_S_
I didn't mean to pick on Patrick. This "honored/humbled" thing has been going
on in our culture for a while now.

~~~
pangram
According to Google, it's been on the rise since the 40's.

[http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=honored+and+humbl...](http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=honored+and+humbled&year_start=1850&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3)

~~~
T_S_
Pretty interesting graph. It started growing exponentially in the 90's.

------
gvsyn
Very respectful, and awesome closing off of the world temporarily.

Another 'use' I find - in areas where you know you'll have no signal. With the
cell radios screaming to contact a station, drains the battery worse than more
or less any other part (unless you have the display on 100% brightness as well
as on all the time)

~~~
statictype
Nice to see this hypothesis observed by others. I long suspected that "failing
to handshake with a cell tower" incurred a significant drain on the battery.

------
noonespecial
Tow knights, upon meeting, show their mutual respect for each other by
extending their hands away from their weapons and towards one another.

A modern equivalent is born?

------
codebaobab
Interesting. I thought Airplane Mode only turned off the cellphone radio. But,
nope, I just tried it and it does turn off the WiFi as well. You can, however,
manually turn WiFi back on, leaving the cell radio off.

------
kevinburke
More or less why I got an iPod touch instead of an iPhone. Still have a crappy
$10 phone off Ebay.

------
antimatter15
I feel like this is a misuse of Airplane Mode. If your photos, etc. are "on
the cloud", via Dropbox or something, they may require internet access to use.
I think a more appropriate feature, which as far as I'm aware, doesn't exist,
would be a no-interruption mode (probably needs a better name) that holds all
notifications and calls during the time it's enabled.

~~~
xutopia
You can enable just wifi when you are in Airplane mode. That's what I do.

------
togasystems
As soon as my head hits the pillow, my iPhone goes into Airplane Mode.

~~~
bryanlarsen
I do that, but mostly to avoid "super-airplane mode", also known as a dead
battery.

~~~
sukuriant
Why not just plug it in at night? Or, are you trying to limit the duration of
your charges?

------
_corbett
I put my phone in airplane mode for exactly this reason--it's not just being
super busy, but I have lots of push notifications setup which in my daily life
are helpful but while I'm sleeping or socializing not. However I need various
other functions on the phone (e.g. my alarm) so turning it off not an option,
moreover switching from airplane mode->non much faster.

------
kevindication
The irony is that Airplane Mode doesn't permit you use your phone on an
airplane (at least per US airline policy, despite the FAA indicating that
airlines may let passengers use phones in airplane mode).

At least it lets you have a conversation without being interrupted.

~~~
brk
I use my iPhone, HTC Incredible and 3G iPad (in airplanes modes) all the time
on US flights. It's never been an issue.

I think that if an inadvertently left-on cell phone could truly disrupt an
airplane we'd see MUCH stricter enforcement. Otherwise you're implying a band
of terrorists playing Angry Birds in all-radios-on mode stands a significant
chance of downing an airliner...

~~~
jellicle
I would guess the average passenger airplane flight has 50-100 cellphones on
throughout the entire flight.

If cell phone interference crashed planes, no plane would make it off the
ground. I doubt there has been a passenger flight in the last ten years that
took off without at least one cell phone operating in the cabin.

~~~
maurycy
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-
ai...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/unsafe-at-any-airspeed)

tl;dr Cellphones and other electronics are more of a risk than you think

~~~
jellicle
If they were, planes would be crashing left and right.

They aren't.

Who are you going to believe, some engineers writing in a magazine or a
massive experiment conducted over a period of 20 years involving every single
passenger flight? Tens of millions of flights per year. Cell phones on every
single one of them. No crashes due to cell phones.

Cell phones do not cause unacceptable interference with airplanes. Q.E.D.

~~~
maurycy
Safety is operated by statistics, not boolean logic.

Things are not either safe or unsafe. It all depends on trade-offs, and what
risks we can accept in exchange of other values, such as comfort.

The article mentionds, though, two worrying things such as the bias in
investigations and ongoing GPS technology usage increase.

I would also stress that it _might be not_ linear. Combined risk of few
hundrends of turned on cell phones is not a mere multiplication of risk for a
single device.

------
PhatBaja
This makes sense but is not "hacker news". It should not have made it to one
of the top news - it's just obvious common sense.

~~~
zackattack
it's actually a great social hack

i) communicates you are important / busy enough to be getting lots of inbound
communication

ii) makes the other person feel important that you value their time

iii) it's a trick because it's a totally natural and awesome transition into
being present with another person.

------
khookie
Airplane mode is also good for keeping your sperm count up when it's in your
pockets.

~~~
albemuth
Is it really that bad? I'd like to see a study on this, at the moment I'm just
a bit freaked out from reading 4HB but I'll definitely try to remember doing
this

~~~
adnam
What is 4HB?

~~~
khafra
The Four-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss. There's a chapter on gaining progeny, for
those who want that; he observes that when you put a cellphone next to rats
for an hour a day their sperm count and free testosterone are lowered.

~~~
adnam
Tim Ferriss observed this? Or in which peer-reviewed journal did the study
appear?

~~~
khafra
Strangely, I couldn't find a place in the book where he directly cites the
dozens of studies he says he read; but he does quote from this one:
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19578660>

