Continental Airlines Looks To LiveTV For InFlight Email and IM

Continental Airlines, the 5th largest in the U.S., announced recently a partnership with LiveTV to offer inflight email and IM capabilities to passengers by January 2009. Set to be added to its fleet of Boeing 737 aircraft, the service will be free to all passengers and available on laptops as well as WiFi-enabled smartphones. They will also be offering 36 channels from DirectTV’s satellite TV lineup, free for everyone but Economy class, who pays $6 for the privilege.

According to the press release, the IM seems to be limited to Blackberry messenger and Yahoo! messenger protocols, though I’m not quite sure how or why. In any case, I’m all for internet connectivity on airlines, just not voice.