Everyone knows you shouldn’t say “bomb” on an airplane — and it should be just as obvious that you shouldn’t name your wireless gadgets ridiculous things, either.
A simple Wi-Fi hotspot sparked terrorism fears on a recent Australia-bound Qantas plane because someone thought it would be a good idea to name it “mobile detonation device.”
Australian airline Qantas has always been quick to embrace new technology. Back in October 2010, it became one of the first airlines to offer iPads as in-flight entertainment systems, and one of the first to embrace Passbook last November.
Today the company launched a new iPhone app that allows users to search and book flights, find accommodation and store digital boarding passes in Passbook.
The Australian Department of Treasury has made a move a lot of large organizations have been making in recent years — and that’s giving up their BlackBerry smartphones for an iPhone. Over the next six weeks, it will ditch its existing fleet of devices and replace them with a different kind of fruit, the iPhone 5.
Australian airline Qantas has announced its support for Apple’s Passbook service, allowing users to checkin using digital boarding passes on their iPhones.
Last week, we reported on the IT migration that Australian airline Qantas was undertaking. That migration and overall technology upgrade includes replacing the airline’s 1,300 BlackBerry handsets with iPhones, swapping hefty pilot flight bags for iPads, and adding an on-demand entertainment system to is fleet of Boeing 767 aircraft that’s accessed using iPads provided to each passenger.
It seems that the migration strategy is even bigger than just those three components. The airline is also looking to overhaul its desktop systems as part of an upgrade to Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud suite. The migration will be completed in partnership with Fujitsu and will include both on-premise and cloud data stores as well as virtual desktops courtesy of Citrix.
Earlier this week, we reported on the move by Australian airline Qantas to swap out the 1,300 BlackBerries used by its staff (and the related infrastructure) in favor of iPhones. It looks like Qantas is doubling down on Apple and iOS. The airline also announced this week that it will begin offering streaming entertainment on iPads across all the planes in its fleet of Boeing 767 aircraft.
Qantas is launching the new service, which it has dubbed QStreaming, following a successful trial of the service earlier this year.
While most CIOs and IT leaders are taking steps to reduce their reliance on RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), some major BlackBerry business customers are ready to abandon RIM’s services and its BlackBerry smartphones in one fell swoop. The latest company to announce such a migration is the Australian airline Qantas.
The company told the Australian (registration required) that it had made the decision to trade its 1,300 BlackBerry devices and related service packages for iPhones. The move, which Qantas expects will deliver significant cost savings, follows a company-wide survey in which a “large majority” of employees said that they’d prefer iPhones.
Like other companies and organizations that have announced similar transitions this year, Qantas chief information officer Paul Jones pointed to the iPhone’s ease of use and popularity as reasons for selecting the iPhone.
