While it’s nice to print out boarding passes at home before you leave, you can’t always do the same on your return leg. Continental has a proposed fix, now in testing in Houston. You load your boarding pass onto your phone’s screen with 2D barcode exposed, then let the TSA and airline ticket checkers scan away. Of course, you can imagine the litany of potential problems: Screens too glossy; poor on-screen rendering; boarding pass vanishes when call comes in; software and/or browser incompatibility; etc. Still, we are happy that airlines are doing something to solve the problem, now that e-ticket check-in has caught on and become nearly as congested and nightmarish as its human-powered predecessor. [USA Today via Gadget Lab]
