The news says that Alec Baldwin was kicked off an airplane for playing a game on his phone.
You hear lots of stuff about the importance of turning off your electronics while flying and lots of stuff about how it's airlines on a power trip. No one seems to know whether its really necessary. I read a report of a study recently, don't remember where, that said the use of in-flight electronics would continue to be banned because the study concluded there wasn't enough proof that these devices didn't mess up a plane in flight.
When I flew on Royal Air Maroc from Marrakech to Munich back in November they didn't say a thing about using electronics on the plane. I listened to my iPod from the time I sat down till the time I went through customs. We cleared the Alps just fine.
And on one of the legs of my journey from Berlin to Goa, I read my Kindle straight through takeoff - even after having been spied by one of the flight attendants who said nothing. During landing they made me put it away.
I suspect that the real reason is not because these things will mess with the aircraft but rather they want you undistracted in the event that something goes wrong and you need to be alert for evacuation instructions and its easier to enforce a blanket ban on electronic devices than it is to parse through who's wearing headphones, etc., etc.
Right? Wrong? I don't know. What I do know is that I prefer to keep reading during a landing than craning my neck out the window thinking about the landing.