Future Android phones might be able toautomatically enable airplane mode

It is generally recommended and advised that when you're on a plane that you put your phone in airplane mode. It's also not a bad idea from a battery standpoint because since you won't be getting cellular reception while up in the skies, airplane mode can be a good way of conserving battery as well.

That being said, we imagine that some of you might forget to do that when you get on a plane, but based on a recently discovered Google patent by Parkifly, it appears that the company has come up with a system that would basically be able to detect when you've boarded an airplane and enable the mode for you automatically.

According to the patent, how this works is based on several factors. For example, it can use your device's location along with other things like the altitude, pressure, speed, and even background noise levels. When it detects those things, it will assume that you're on a plane and airplane mode can then be activated automatically.

It's actually quite an interesting idea and also a potentially useful one, but given that this is a patent, there's no guarantee that Google has concrete plans to make it a reality or if they're simply trying to protect an idea that they could then potentially license out to other companies who might want to use it.