Today the major U.S. airline Continental announced that they would begin offering “free Wi-Fi” to passengers starting in January 2009. I put “free Wi-Fi” in quotes because they really shouldn’t call it that. It’s not like you can surf the web on your computer or even on your cellphone, instead with their service you basically can just use select smartphones to check your Yahoo Mail, connect to Yahoo Messenger, or connect to the BlackBerry network.

While this is certainly better than what we currently have – which is nothing – it’s ridiculous to put these restrictions on a service. Air travel absolutely sucks. Something like Wi-Fi might actually make it tolerable, but only if it is actually Wi-Fi where you can, you know, use the Internet.

I agree with CrunchGear though that the 36 channels of DirecTV is a good deal – even if it’s $6 for economy fliers (free for first-class). It might also mean that they may actually have to make some new planes other than the 1970s throwbacks that I swear I’ve flown in every single time I’ve gone anywhere the past 10 years.