Air-travel used to provide a sanctum, and one of the last places on earth where you could escape your telephone and email with a perfectly valid excuse for being out of touch. It was heaven in the sky, and it’s coming to an end.

There are already some airlines internationally offering in-flight WiFi with internet connectivity and others that are testing on-board GSM cells that would even allow you to use your cellular phone onboard. And no, that isn’t dangerous – cellphones don’t interfere with systems on aeroplanes. Period.

South Africa is joining the action now as budget airline Mango has announced that it will be the first local carrier to provide in-flight WiFi thanks to its partnership with WirelessG, an internet service provider company that is bringing the technology to South Africa. So soon you’ll be able to jet from Cape Town to Johannesburg, for example, and connect in the air for less than R1 per megabyte, according to the SAA-owned airline. And that’s not a bad price, being less than half of what it costs to connect via 3G out-of-bundle, for example.

Mango said it is awaiting final approval from the Civil Aviation Authority, but that the service would be available later this year on all of its Boeing 737-800 aircrafts. Mango’s CEO Nico Bezuidenhout reckons that the service offers an additional revenue stream for Mango, which is vital for budget airlines that make more money from rental and accommodation partnerships and the like than they usually do from flying people around. He said that Mango would employ a similar rollout process as America’s low cost Southwest airline.

Connecting the aircraft means using satellite connectivity – so I wouldn’t expect you to be able to play World of Warcraft or chat to your granny on Skype while in the air, but email, instant messaging, web browsing and the like should be pretty good.

CEO of WirelessG, Carel van der Merwe explained that, “The cost of data transfer is more affordable than many bandwidth offerings on the ground”.

Finnish mobile company Nokia has made a slew of announcements in recent months, revealing everything from new music services to a netbook computer it will soon unleash on the market. The company is fighting back against criticism from analysts and an increasingly competitive market where everyone from Apple to Blackberry is slicing away at a pie that Nokia used to own.

At the 2009 Nokia World conference in Stuttgart, in September this year, I was able to sample some of the new devices Nokia will soon be making available, and spoke to the company’s management about its new, aggressive stance.

The Nokia N97 Mini and N900 were the darlings of the show in terms of phones, along with the new X3 and X6 that are available with the Comes With Music service Nokia has launched around the world, including in South Africa. With Comes With Music one purchases one of the phones that include the service and gains access to the Nokia Music store where you can download as much music as you want to – for free. And when the service contract expires, you get to keep the music.

The N900 is a new smartphone device that runs an operating system called Maemo, which is based on Linux. It’s a slick device with a slide-out keyboard that promises to do everything short of the dishes.

The Booklet 3G was another focus of the event. This is a mini laptop, or netbook, device that hails Nokia’s return to that sector of the mobile computing market. A price of €575 was announced for the device and it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect to pay about R7 000 for it when we do finally see it in SA.

The Booklet is a remarkable device. Nokia says it offers 12 hours of battery life – so you can bet on at least eight, and with a 120GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM and sufficiently powerful Intel Atom processor, it delivers about as much computing power and storage space as anyone would need on the move. It runs Windows 7 and a collection of Nokia’s Ovi applications. It even has built-in 3G and a GPS.

These were just some of the announcements and products featured – others included everything from slick headsets to a new service called Nokia Money aimed at providing transactional banking services to people currently out of reach of conventional banking products.

Any company that thinks stealing Nokia’s market is going to be a piece of cake should prepare for a challenge. And, clearly, competition is good for the Fins.

Mountains of smouldering, abandoned computer parts litter areas of Nigeria, South Africa and other countries on the continent. They are the legacy of an information age in which computers are seldom kept for longer than two or three years before being disposed of. The continent has become a dumping ground for European companies who either disguise their waste as donations or just outright dump it in Africa. And, of course, Africa generates its own technology waste too, which must be taken care of.

The international waste problem is the target of several initiatives aimed at stopping the disposal of hazardous waste from the developed world and the countries that house companies responsible for the dumping are wising up to the problem. There are also initiatives in Africa aimed at the recycling and reuse of old technology – which can be processed for the removal of precious minerals, such as gold and copper (a ton of IT waste can deliver one ounce of gold), be used in the production of new technology, or turned into other items, such as jewellery.

HP is one company that offers a take-back programme whereby it helps its customers safely and responsibly dispose of their old technology. The company is also involved in international research into technology recycling that was conducted during 2008 and early 2009, which provided input into recycling efforts.

HP, as one of the biggest vendors of technology in the world, says it believes it has a responsibility to facilitate the take-back and recycling of this nature of waste. Its programme in South Africa represents the 52^nd country where HP has introduced recycling services in the conscientious handling of E-waste.

“While disposal of E-waste is not a new service in South Africa, HP’s strategy for handling this growing problem is different, sustainable and based on environmental responsibility,” says Ruben Janse van Rensburg , HP South Africa’s environmental business head.

He says the pilot conducted last year provided promising results and offered guidance into how technology should be disposed of in the future.

Among HP’s global partners in the research initiative were the Global Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF) and the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research. The pilot project is based in Cape Town and was carried out in South Africa, Morocco and Kenya during 2008.

Facilities have also been established for processing waste. These include separating components and other recycling methods, but also facilitate some unusual repurposing such as the creation of artworks and jewellery fashioned from old bits and pieces of technology.

“The results have been encouraging. Approximately 60 tonnes of electronic equipment were processed at the facility, generating an income of around R126 000 from February to November 2008 and created direct employment for 19 people,” says Dr Kirstie McIntyre, who heads up environmental compliance for the environmental business management organisation at HP.

Whether ending up as part of new computers, or as something decorating a wall, old IT is decreasingly ending up on smouldering pyres in Nigeria and Kenya.

Winstone Jordaan is one of the people working to make flying cars common place. I met him when I interviewed him on radio about the South African leg of a solar-car race he was organising. Winstone believes flying cars are a certainty and that in a decade’s time we will no longer laugh at the concept.

“I started designing my own flying car in university,” he says. “In the early 90s I was looking around for a motor with a low power-to-weight ratio that would suit a flying car. In 1991 I had access to one of the first Internet connections in the country and used it for research. This is when I found Freedom Motors in the USA that manufactured motors of the kind I was looking for.”

“I called Freedom Motors to find out more about the motor and they asked me what my application was. I told them not to laugh, but that I wanted to use it in a flying car. To my surprise they took my request very seriously and said that they were not allowed to sell the motors to anyone making flying cars.” The reason for this was because Freedom Motors was founded by a company called Moller International that was already working on a commercial flying car.”

Winstone corresponded with Moller International and ended up on an advisory panel of sorts, consisting of individuals around the world that monitor the feasibility of flying cars.

“I’ve been serving on the board ever since, and in 2000 I travelled to the USA and spent some time with them and put provisional agreements in place that if the flying car ever came to South Africa, I’d be the one to drive it… so to speak.”

Today there are over 30 companies in the world that claim to be building flying cars. Winstone says his company leads the way, however, in that it has working prototypes already.

At this point in the conversation I have to tell Winstone about my overwhelming doubt – flying is just not safe. Prang a car into a lamppost and it’s seldom a big deal, but drop one out of mid-flight a kilometre above the ground and… well, you get the picture.

But Winstone says technological progress is tackling the question of safety, which his company has pretty much solved. He has bigger fish to fry.

“I don’t think danger is a big barrier. Aircrafts are already safer than cars in general. The big thing is that everything in our flying car system is designed for dual or triple redundancy, so everything would have to fail two or three times before your car would crash. And even if it did there is little chance of it falling out of the sky – we currently have eight engines built into the car that keep it aloft. And the car can fly with only three active engines.

NASA has new technology that Winstone says will help to create ‘virtual highway’ systems for flying cars. This is called SATS 0 and allows for aircrafts to be guided from point to point without human interaction. One simply tells the craft where to go.

Aeroplanes can already take off, fly and land themselves. The next step is to allow them to do so en mass and in close proximity to each other, under the guidance of computers.

“Road intersections are two-dimensional, but in the sky height can also be adjusted, allowing for many more crafts to travel through common areas,” explains Winstone.

“The idea is that eventually people will not be flying the car at all. It will be an automated system. The cars will compute flight paths and follow virtual highway systems governed by computers. People will just be passengers,” Winstone says. “We believe that flying cars won’t be sold in huge numbers until they are 100 percent automated.”

And, of course, flying cars will not be cheap. “We are already taking orders, but the actual cars are not available yet. To get your name on the list will cost $20 000, and the final cost of the car will be $1 million at this point.”

Winstone says that the first people to own flying cars will be the kind of people who own private helicopters now, and adds that no decent helicopter can be purchased for under $2 million. “But the target price for the flying car is about $60 000 once mass production begins,” he says.

And will we see the flying car actually take to the skies in our lifetime? Winstone is confident that the answer is yes. “I can see it becoming common place in the next 10 to 15 years,” he states. “In 10 years-time the systems should be ready and then mass production will begin. Five years after that they should become affordable enough for the kind of use we envisage.”

Winstone believes that by 10 years from now everyone will have seen a flying car at least once. “In 15 years time I believe you will not be able to look up in a city without seeing a flying car, and in 20 to 25 years you will see distinct lines of vehicles making their way across virtual highways in the sky.”

And you thought your new sports car was impressive. I can’t wait to catch up with Winstone in a decade’s time to see if his predictions transpire. Until then, flying cars remain in the realm of Hollywood.