The best apps and gadgets to deal with long-haul boredom

Life at 12,000 metres is a test of endurance, and it’s getting harder. Sure, someone brings you food and drink – for now, at least – but the perks of jet-setting are quickly diminishing. The most obvious is with inflight entertainment screens, which are being gradually degraded. We’re all to blame; the presence of so many iPads and tablets in the cabin means that providing passengers with the latest and greatest movies is taking an ever-lower priority.

Of course, there is a way for long-haul boredom to be instantly banished. However, not only is high-speed satellite Wi-fi taking its sweet time to become common or affordable in the air, but where it does exist it’s painfully slow. Checking email is fine – just about – but you can forget about streaming from Netflix. So it’s to the offline world that we all must head for entertainment.

Save for advising you take a large portable battery like the 10,000mAh mophie Powerstation 5X external battery (HK$1,098, apple.com/hk), we’ll skip over watching films or playing a game on a tablet or phone and go straight for the next most popular pastime on the long haul; reading. While previous incarnations of its reader have had handy backlighting ideal for the gloom of a night-flight, the latest Kindle is just the ticket for aircraft cabins.

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Although it’s got the same six-inch screen as the Kindle Voyage, the new Kindle Oasis (HK$2,249, amazon.com) is 20 per cent lighter and 30 per cent thinner. Equipped with 60 per cent more LEDs than before, it’s now more comfortable to read in the dark, and more easily seen when someone in a window seat nearby throws open the blind and sunlight streams in.

Although they’ve got the most restricted access, window seats can be the best in the house. The unique Flyover Country app will tell you what’s below you, complete with offline Wikipedia articles, if you tell it what route you’re about to fly. Once you know where you are, the 3D world fact book app Geo Walk HD can also be entertaining while periodically looking out of the window, as can the National Geographic World Atlas app. It can be quite a show; I recently took some spectacular photos while cruising over the Zagros Mountains that separate Iran and Iraq (countries I’ll probably never touch down in), while those flying the polar route between Asia and Europe at night should keep a lookout for the Northern Lights. If you want to know if that’s likely, the Aurora Forecast app lets you see whether you’ll be flying through the otherwise unpredictable ‘aurora oval’ that night, while general stargazing is possible if the cabin lights are turned off. Apps like Star Walk 2, SkySafari and Sky Live will help you identify the brightest stars.