From today, business class passengers on all regional SAA flights will be entertained with movies, TV series, magazines and music played on Samsung Ativ Windows RT tablets.

The initiative was launched this morning by Samsung and SAA, who showed a group of journalists what passengers are in for by giving them a mock flight on which they got to enjoy the benefits of business class for the morning, including the new tablet-based in-flight entertainment.

The tablets effectively replace the usual screens attached to the backs of seats or hidden away by collapsing arms. These aren’t full-function tablets, however, they simply give people access to an intuitive touchscreen-based menu system that allows them to choose what to watch or listen to.

The movies on offer were SAA’s usual fare (a mix of older and some current titles), TV shows and the music selection had a decided local flavour, and several business, health and entertainment-focused magazines were available for our reading pleasure. We were told that each seat also comes with a USB charging port to ensure tablets are always powered.

Best of all? The addition of tablets won’t affect ticket prices. Well, that’s what we were told, anyway.

All well and good, but…

Now, that’s all well and good and SAA should be commended for putting in the effort to bring this sort of service to its passengers, but we picked up a few issues right away.

Firstly, SAA is using the same content it currently plays on its other flights, which means it’s of low quality – made all the more noticeable by the Ativ’s relatively large 10.1-inch screen – and cut to a 4:3 aspect ratio, so there are big black bars down the sides when anything plays.

Seems a pity, as it’s 2015 and 4:3 should have gone the way of the dodo years ago already. I was promised the technical team would be looking into that in the coming weeks, so by the time you fly business class somewhere, those black bars could be gone. But don’t hold your breath.

Also, the Ativ Tab GT-P8510 is a 2012 tablet, and doesn’t have a Full HD screen (it’s just 1 366 x 768 according to its official spec sheet), so even when SAA sorts its aspect ratio issues out the content still won’t be Full HD. Then again, that’s a relatively understandable compromise as you can’t have tons of Full HD movies and TV series when you’re working with just 32GB of internal storage, which these tablets are.

And then there’s the interface itself, which still has a few glitches to work out, like a dark black bar appearing at the bottom of each icon that sometimes obscures what’s being showed.

Er, but why?

So, you’re likely reading all this and wondering why SAA even bothered – they’re effectively offering three-year-old tablets running an obsolete operating system playing low-resolution content that last fit on TVs from the late 90s. I know that’s what I was thinking, but when I asked, the answer surprised me.

Bear with me as I take you through a scenario that may give you a better understanding of SAA’s thinking, as outlined to me by SAA’s chief information officer, Phinda Ncala.

Imagine you have a fleet of planes, some built recently, others a good few years old but none of them have integrated WiFi. New consumer technologies have come along that a lot of your passengers (and especially your business class passengers) embrace, like mobile phones, tablets, and movies and TV shows delivered over the internet, and you start to think that maybe you should give them access to those things on your planes.

So you look at retrofitting WiFi equipment into your rather large fleet. Most importantly, it needs to provide onboard WiFi while not interfering with any of your planes’ sensitive electronic systems, and then connect to the internet. Thanks to the state of your existing fleet, most of your older planes would need to be retrofitted with the necessary equipment, at a significant cost.

New planes, meanwhile, are being built from the ground up to support those technologies. You’ve ordered a few, and all they need to do is arrive so that you can start rolling out 21st-century services to your passengers, but they won’t be arriving for quite some time due to some, erm, business complications.

What do you do in the meantime? You find a way to give your customers a taste of that future without resorting to a full-on retrofit. In SAA’s case, that took the form of Samsung tablets offered to business class customers. It’s basically a stop-gap solution, a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

On the right track

So while it’s not exactly ideal, and the technologies on offer aren’t what anyone will call cutting-edge, it’s at least a step in the right direction. I was told SAA will look at providing something similar for economy class passengers, but that will depend on how well it works out with business class travellers.

As of today, business class passengers travelling with SAA will be offered these Samsung tablets, so if you happen to be one of them, please drop us a line and let us know what you think.