Wine and Computers at Philly Airport

I’m sitting at the lovely Vino Volo at the Philadelphia airport, enjoying the artificial ambiance of wine flights while on a long layover. I did my usual walk around the airport, looking at use of personal technology. There are the usual host of folks clustered around the wall plugs. In fact, the gentleman at the table next to me just changed tables to be near the wall plug in the restaurant.

More netbooks were evident than my last trip, not surprising. I’m also seeing more SmartPhones being used for between-flight entertainment.

What I haven’t seen that much is the number of retail stores with “add ons,” especially for power. An entire aisle of the cellular accessory store here is just energy cords and attachments for phones, netbooks, and laptops.

I mentioned this to the gentleman who just plugged in to the wall next to me. He called it “keeping us power happy.”

Is this a big hurdle/revenue opportunity — keeping us “power happy”? Or with the gentleman that was at the program in Lisbon with last week, who has a netbook with 6 “real” hours of usage?

So I’ll keep watching for the power-happy users at my itinerant airport visits…and keep asking the question of social implications and challenges to this limit.

Or maybe this is just how we’re supposed to meet people at airports….