It’s been a while since I posted.  It’s summer, and that means traveling, time out of the office, etc., and that has certainly slowed me down on posts.  However, I am in the office this week, and I did run across another interesting article.  The article discusses how the TSA and several airlines are starting to accelerate the use of mobile phones as vehicles for electronic boarding passes.

Here’s how it works:

1. You go to your airline’s standard or mobile website to check-in for your flight.
2. Once it comes time to print your boarding pass, you choose to have it sent electronically via email.
3. You open the email on your mobile device while going through security at the airport.  It contains a 2D Barcode with all of your flight information.
4. The TSA representative scans the PDF on the screen of your device with a barcode scanner to verify your electronic boarding pass.
5. You pass through security and head for your flight.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty slick.  I don’t know how many of you have taken advantage of this before, but I suspect we’ll all be using it in the future.  It reduces cost for airlines, because there are no materials consumed (paper and ink), or maintenance required for printers, and the TSA claims it is more secure.  And as far as I am concerned, it is more convenient.  Most of us always have our phones with us.

What I find even more intriguing about this process, is that it shows how smarter cell phones are capable of doing something you can’t do with a laptop.  You wouldn’t open up your laptop at a security checkpoint so they could scan an electronic boarding pass, but you can easily do it with your intelligent “phone”.  This is just another example of how new technology approaches are making the cell phone much more than something you talk and text on.