Though the service hasn't launched yet, I had a chance to try it out on the Gogo One, the same flying laboratory where I once tested Gogo's 9.8 Mbps in-flight WiFi. (This time, I had a lucky reader on board with me.) For whatever reason -- unfinished software, the fact that I was at an airport in rural Illinois -- I wasn't able to complete the registration process on my own Verizon phone. (It didn't help that I also had a patchy signal.) So, Gogo lent me an iPhone 5s and a Moto X, both of which had already been set up. Once I had a working device in hand, I had no problem getting online. As always with Gogo's in-flight WiFi service, you can't use it below 10,000 feet, which means the FAA's new policy about using mobile devices during takeoff and landing won't make a difference here.

Texting from Gogo's app works well, which is good news, since it's the only thing passengers in the US will be able to do with it. What is there to say, really? Just select a number from your contacts or enter the number manually, and start texting. I happened to be texting with a friend who was paying close attention to his phone, and he responded to my messages as quickly as he normally would. If there was a delay in the transmission (and I don't think there was), I didn't notice it. The only caveat is that the app currently supports simple text messages only. If you want to attach a picture, you can still do it on iMessage, but with Gogo, at least, you're out of luck.

Voice calling, on the other hand, still has a ways to go before people will really want to make calls in-flight. After making numerous calls on the Moto X and a borrowed Galaxy Note 3, I consistently had trouble hearing my callers (though they had no problem hearing me). Using a Jawbone Bluetooth headset helped cancel out the roar of the plane engines to some extent, but even then, I had to concentrate in order to hear the person on the other end. As you'd expect, I also had better luck when the person on the other end was speaking relatively loudly, which isn't something I normally have to ask of people when making calls over Verizon. Interestingly, too, the audio quality was slightly better on the Note than on the Moto X (even without the Bluetooth headset), so your results may also vary depending on the phone you're using.

Also, even when I could hear people, there was a slight delay -- not uncommon for WiFi calls. Slightly more impressively, four of us on Gogo's test plane were at one point making phone calls simultaneously (we were initially encouraged to only go two at a time). That speaks to the robustness of the network, but then again, do you really want lots of people blabbing away in coach? Fortunately, at least, so long as it's this difficult to hear people, passengers might be dissuaded from making non-urgent calls. And who knows? If airlines charge as much for voice calls as they do for the relatively slow WiFi, maybe passengers will pass their boredom by playing Bejeweled instead.