Now this was quite useful

I was on a recent flight from Helsinki back to London flying on a new Finnair Airbus A321.

As well as the usual table there was this interesting ledge on the back of the seat in front of me which you could use to prop your phone (or I guess a small tablet) to watch a video during the flight.

back of an airline seat

Now I would have never guessed this was there or what its purpose was unless the person sitting on my row started using it with their phone.

You weren’t allowed to use it during take off and landing, but otherwise it was useful to have if you either had a drink, or use the table for something like a laptop. Of course, it also allows you to watch stuff without holding the phone (or if you don’t have a stand for your phone).

Roaming in Finland

I was flying off to Finland and would be using my iPhone out there.

Following issues with using data in Portugal a few years ago with excessive data usage on my iPhone, I followed the same process I had used in October 2023 when I went to Amsterdam and last year when I went to Europe.

When I was on the plane at Heathrow, I went into Settings -> Mobile Data and turned off virtually all the apps which could use mobile data. Took me a while as there were a fair few. I turned off mobile data for virtually all my apps and also specifically iCloud Driveand iCloud Backup. I am pretty sure they were the culprits for my excessive data usage whilst in Portugal.

As and when I needed to use apps, I either used the hotel wifi, or switched on mobile data for specific apps.

I didn’t  run out of data this visit, it was a shorter visit, just a few days. All worked fine.

I was also impressed with the mobile data speeds in Finland, which to be honest knowing their history (you know Nokia) wasn’t too surprising.