Mobile office in the sky: On board the Airbus A380

I have just experienced the future of Business Class on board the newest, largest passenger jet: Singapore Airlines Airbus A380.

I bought the ticket and paid standard Business Class fare myself; here's how I really feel about the new Business Class:

Plenty of space: The seat was incredibly spacious, wide enough to fit two people. It felt like working in your own office cubicle in the sky.

Plenty of storage, too: Right beside the windows at both sides of the plane, there are roomy compartments that you can store your laptop, folders, briefcase, shoes, sweater, almost anything else (except luggage). I was able to put away my laptop into the compartment while charging up the battery via the in-seat power supply.

Read and edit your documents: The in-flight entertainment system includes the StarOffice software to let you read and edit your Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on the 15.4-inch LCD screen. Just plug your USB drive into the system, use the provided File Manager to browse the files on your USB drive and open them. The system feels sluggish and slow to respond, especially when opening PowerPoint files, but it's adequate for simple browsing and editing.

Plug in your mouse: There's a tiny QWERTY keypad provided for keyboard input and navigation, but the system was a lot easier to use when I plugged in my USB mouse.

Other media capabilities: There's a PDF file viewer, a photo viewer (for running a slideshow of your JPEG photo files), and a media player (for playing MP3 audio files). The provided Active Noise Cancellation headphones worked great for listening to the MP3 files.

Bring a power socket adaptor: The in-seat power supply supports U.S. and Australian-style power plugs (2 flat pins) but not the U.K.-style power plug (3 thick pins). If you don't use an adaptor, you can't use Singapore power plugs on board Singapore Airlines. How odd.

Signing off on board SQ220/A380 from Sydney to Singapore.


Your office cubicle in the sky









15.4-inch LCD screen with power supply and 2 USB ports









All plugged in and ready to work: Laptop power, USB drive, USB mouse












The QWERTY keypad for editing your documents









StarOffice for reading and editing your documents










Working on your PowerPoint slides just like you would on a PC









Charging your laptop when you're not working

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Lee Lup Yuen

Lee Lup Yuen is passionate about mobile phones and PDAs, as he is constantly buying new gadgets and programming them in J2ME, .NET, Symbian and AppForge. He has developed commercial applications with mobile technologies like SMS, MMS, WAP, 3G video streaming and location-based services.