This blog has moved!

It’s been the buzz around the internet/office for a few months now. Virgin America, the new airline from Virgin with domestic flights in the United States, has been much talked about and even applauded for their taking a strong intiative to bring innovation to the economy cabin through the usage of technology. While the marketing is done well and the overall concepts of all their ideas are great, the execution leaves much to be desired.

If you had some time to read Engadget’s review from the inaurgural flight, I’m sure you’ve seen by now (and maybe even decided) that Virgin America is leaps in front of JetBlue in every way, shape and form. More options, better service, more technology, and most importantly, much more comfortable. However, it’s expected for an inaurgual flight to go smoothly, so the reveiw was biased, how could it not be. There were tech’s on board, specially trained help, the best pilots the company could find…etc etc. Despite the differences of the first flight and the everyday operation flights today, the one thing that hasn’t changed is RED, the in-flight entertainment system.

So let’s ignore the ridiculous list of things that drove me crazy on the trip and focus only on RED. I flew the premier route according to Virgin America this past week. JFK, New York to San Francisco International Airport. From JFK to SFO, I didn’t even have the luxury of playing with RED, because ONLY our row and the row behind us was broken. So here I am on a 5.5 hour flight thinking about only the great reviews I’ve seen about the entertainment system and I can’t play them because it’s broken. These planes are brand new, how could it possibly not work! But I work with technology…it doesn’t always just work like we’d want it to, so I was accepting of that; however, the in-flight crew made no effort to reboot the systems or try to get them working, in fact, they joked around about how it was a mis-fortune. I’m sorry, but the last thing I want to hear when I’m facing a 5 hour flight with no entertainment is a joke.

That aside, the rest of the flight from NY to San Fran was on par with the start. The long flight coupled with the attitudes from the flight crew didn’t make the situation any better.

On the way back, I was hoping I’d get a chance to play with RED, and low and behold, after yet another lack-luster check-in/boarding process, we were on our way with RED ready to go.

The concept seems cool, awesome TV, movies, games, chat, ordering food. Everything you could want. Add that touch screen, and a nice remote, what could be better? Apparently a lot. Where to start…

Touch Screen: Awesome idea really, and I’m sincere when I say that, but it turned out to be the worst thing Virgin came up with. It was very unresponsive and it required a lot of “pushing” to get things to do what you wanted them to do. If you’re going to put a touch screen on the back of someone’s seat that might be sleeping, it needs to be sensitive. I laid off the screen a lot because I was nervous about annoying the people in front of me. Granted, not everyone is going to be as considerate as me, this is something that should of been thought of. Pressure sensitive screens was NOT the way to go. Maybe I’m spoiled with my iPhone, but I’ve played with hundreds of other touch screens, and Virgin’s was not nearly as nice as other screens I’ve seen on the market. Points for effort, but that’s pretty much it.

The RED System: Great right? Amazing concept. Bring every aspect of service and entertainment into 1 unit. Centralize ordering and service, remove cash from the equation to lighten the load on the flight crew. Brilliant in theory. It runs linux, that’s such a great move. You keep costs down, and you encourage open source, but let me tell you guys, I’ve never seen linux crash so much in my life time. In my seat as well as the two seats next to me, each of our systems crashed at least once. After the 10 minute boot process, you finnally get back to the system which is probably the most unresponsive computer I’ve ever played with. Push a button, and it shows the depressed state, 2-3 seconds later. All the while, a cursor follows you around the screen as you press around. Why isn’t the cursor hidden? Click the “Quick Nav” and you wait a few seconds for a long menu to pop up that’s actually harder to get to than the regular navigation. The graphics look awesome and the interface is nice; however, the rendering is horrific, overlays that are half transparent, broken graphics that aren’t aligned when you quit certian things or fragmented screens as you move from menu to menu. Everything is coupled to produce a terrible flow and an awful user experience. Sure it says Beta, but that’s a marketing move, you don’t put half-assed software in production planes. Are the engines in Beta too?

Google Maps: I remember sitting on the first flight I ever took on JetBlue and watching their ugly map system and going “You know how easy it would be to use Google Maps, all you need to do is plug in the coordinates of the trip as you move”. So when I heard that Virgin decided to use Google Maps for their “Journey” system, I thought I’d see a nice feature. Not really. The maps are pretty jumpy and when you click to move around, you wait a bit before seeing any results. You can’t actually click the map to move around (like in EVERY other Google map implementation) and the arrows that do the moving are awkwardly positioned than you’re normally used to (right vs left). The zooming takes a long time as well and its not nearly as smooth as it should be. On top of all that, the plane shows different positions for different seats. The seat next to me said the plane was in JFK airport while my seats showed us hovering over the Great South Bay. How is that even possible? Why isn’t the system unified to some extent? Is each system actually running the data to Google and waiting for the results? Terrible execution. Furthermore, the information about the altitude, speed, distance and other numbers is flashed like on a threadmill instead of just steadily positioned on the screen. There certainly is plenty of room in the information box for more than 1 line of text, but the programmers clearly didn’t think that’d be a good idea. My boss sitting next to me described it best when he said: “It’s like the designer and the programmer didn’t talk about this at all. The designer thought this would be a great space to put flight information so he made it big enough, and then no one told the programmer about that.” Again, points for the idea, negatives for the implementation.

Ordering: I can’t really get too much into this because I’m still pretty aggrivated that there wasn’t a free meal on the 1:35PM Flight from SFO to JFK. Ordering in your seat is pretty cool. I can’t knock this that much. Swipe your card, 5 minutes later, a drink arrives. Very nice idea and this is a great thing to have especially when the alternative is using cash. The ONLY thing I can really complain about the ordering system is that the “checkout” process needs some work. When you have all Free items in your “cart”, you still need to “Pay” as far as the text goes. I can only imagine that this would cause some confusion among older folks who don’t understand that you need to swipe your card for the order to go through. Overall, well done, but get in there with your designers again and have another look.

TV: Local channels? Where the hell are they? Maybe it was just my flight, but 4 ESPN’s and no ABC, NBC or CBS is a bit aggrivating. Sure there’s FOX, but 1 out of 4 is not anything to be proud of. Maybe this was isolated to my flight though, so this comment is conditional.

Program Guide: Awesome that you can make reminders for shows you want to watch. Well done, but the interface scrolls one line at a time and it takes a lot of tapping to see what you want. How come when I click the current time slot for a channel, it asks to setup a reminder instead of going to that channel?

Media Player: I’m pretty sure even the first version of Windows Media Player had th time left/elapsed time on the player along with a progress bar for the movie. There’s nothing worse than being REALLY into a movie and having to go to the bathroom but not knowing where you are in the movie to gauge if you should wait it out or not. Sure there’s a big black box that was probably designed to have a elapsed time in there, but no one seems to thought it was a good idea to actually put it in. The only thing you see? The CURRENT time, which is actually handy because NO WHERE ELSE on the RED system can the current time be found except while watching TV or a Movie. Why? No idea.

I could probably tear into the system for another two or three paragraphs pages, but this posting is long enough.

All in all, great ideas, but Virgin rushed off the ground too fast. RED needs a few more months of development/QA before it can reach beta status. Hopefully in the coming months/year, we’ll see some much needed updates to RED along with an overhaul of their service team, but that’s another entry all together.