?The iPhones will give our flight attendants quicker and easier access to tools they need to do their job, and we believe that will translate into a better customer experience,? said Karen May, United?s public relations manager.

?As a company, we?re focused on technological innovation. We began equipping our pilots with iPads in 2011 and are upgrading them to iPad Air 2, so providing iPhones for flight attendants is another step in our move toward creating paperless aircraft and flight decks.?

United has been boosting opportunities for in-flight use of mobile for the past several months. In October, it announced it would outfit more than 200 United Express regional jets with Wi-Fi for flights to begin later this year.

While United and other airlines are striving to match the ability of buses and trains to let customers use mobile in-transit, United?s mobile strategy in the past year has the carrier ahead of the curve. Its moves have included the launch of passport scanning for passengers and their integration with Uber for destination pickups.

?The breadth of functionality that will now become available to United?s 23,000 flight attendants is immense,? said Dan Thompson, senior vice president for global strategy and marketing for GuestLogix, a Toronto-based provider of retail technology and merchandising systems to travel operators.

?There is no question that mobile devices have changed the way that we all work, in any industry, so to bring this to arguably the most mobile workforce in the world, is a brilliant move.?

?United is not unlike many of our other customers who want to deliver more powerful tools to their workforce and saw the iPhone 6 Plus as a catalyst to make this type of move as quickly as possible,? he said.

?I would put them well into the Top 5, in terms of having a forward-thinking mobile strategy team that is as focused on the passenger experience as they are on their crew?s experience.?

Airlines? move to treat the mobile channel seriously and make significant investments in equipping crew with mobile devices is long overdue.

?This is more of an advance in the passenger experience than an advance in mobile marketing,? said Vanessa Horwell, principal and chief strategy officer with ThinkInk in Miami. ?That said, if airlines are able to create on-board experiences where they can communicate with passengers directly to their mobile devices, it?s also clearly a huge opportunity for mobile marketing.

?Other airlines have been doing this for several years ? working with HP, Microsoft, Samsung and Nokia, for example, as well as other device and software manufacturers,? she said.

?Clearly, they?ve lost ground in mobile innovation when compared with the hotel sector and even traditional retailers,? Ms. Horwell said. ?Most legacy airlines, especially larger ones, recognize that mobile search is going to overtake desktop search in 2015, and that more than half of today?s passengers are booking and paying for travel on mobile devices and tablets rather than desktops.

?It?s only logical that every investment United and other airlines make will be in mobile,? she said.