When you’re travelling, especially by plane, the experience has the capacity to be awful. Crying kids (even if they’re yours!), loud / rude passengers, expensive food, or even people burping the whole flight that smells like bologna and Red Hots (hail to our Chief Editor’s last experience)… it can be a downright bad time.

Fortunately, Boeing is aiming to make your experience better – as long as you’re flying on one of their 787 Dreamliners. They have announced two different in-flight entertainment systems, running Android: the Panasonic eX3, as well as the Thales TopSeries Avant.

The Thales system is the only one with specifics announced, but’s no game: it comes in 10″ and 17″ versions, with dual core ARM CPUs and 1GB RAM, as well as a huge 256GB of internal storage.

The interface is highly customized, making it difficult to decipher the Android version running on these things. However, speculation tells us it’s something slightly dated, like 2.3 or 3.0. To make up for it, however, the devices will have access to in-flight wifi.

To make things even sweeter, the Touch Passenger Media Unit – or TouchPMU – comes included. It’s a 3.8″ handheld Android device that works as a companion to the Avant, with all the options (supposedly) in your Android phone.

Sounds pretty cool to us. Maybe we can find ourselves in front of one of these devices on our way to CES 2013… if we suddenly become rich enough to get on one of these airliners. Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

via extremetech