Want to stay informed about your flight in midair without wifi? Your iPhone is your WindowSeat

Every once in a while, an app comes across my desk that I have to wait a while to try. Because it requires me to be somewhere in particular to really get a feel for what it does. This latest one, required me to be about 35,000 ft up in the air.

Get ready to take your WindowSeat. An interesting new iPhone app from Portland-based AppOven designed to keep you informed about your flight and what you’re passing over—whether you have an Internet connection or not.

So what’s it do? Well, according to its creators, WindowSeat allows you to:

Track your flight without GPS or a network connection. WindowSeat gives you a better view of where you’re flying, when you’ll arrive, and what’s below you, all while you’re offline.

Yeah. Now you see why I wanted to test it.

How’d it do? It tests out pretty well. It was close on my flight time, gave me a really good idea of where I was in the air, and provided a ton of interesting tidbits about the geography and cities in my flight path. All while in airplane mode, in strict accordance with the flight attendants’ direction. (Okay so my flight had wifi, but I chose not to use it for this test.)

I flew a fairly common route—PDX to ORD. So the app had no problem pointing out all kinds of things along the way. And when it wasn’t cloudy, I could actually spot a few of them. Which was cool. As were the Wikipedia-like pages that shared all the details.

I mean granted, I’m easily entertained, but I thought it was awesome to know where I was.

The only iffy factor can be blamed on me. You see, as you well know, you need to have your phone off when the plane is taking off. Which means you need to remember the time the wheels left the ground so that 10 minutes into the flight, you can tell the app when the flight started. I might have been a little off on my time guess.

But that’s okay. Because the app gives you the ability to adjust mid-course. So when the pilot gave an update, I moved the indicator closer to where we actually were. Problem solved.

Now when it comes to pricing, the app is a little spendier than most. It’s $6.99 in the App Store. But if you’ve finished all of the levels on Ramps (hint, hint) and you’re looking for something else to do midflight, it could be the perfect accessory for your travels.

For more information or to download the app yourself, visit WindowSeat.

Published by Rick Turoczy

More than mildly obsessed with the Portland startup community. Founder and editor at Silicon Florist. Cofounder and general manager at PIE. Follow me on Twitter: @turoczy View all posts by Rick Turoczy