That's not what Apple announced. Satellite service is only for emergencies and is cumbersome to use.
Today was a real shot at two of Garmin’s profit centres with the Apple Watch Pro also targeting their GPS sports watches.
Moving forward, having both will be great, but I think having to rely only on an iPhone would make me a bit nervous, so I’m not sure how much of a threat this is for the inReach devices (at least for now).
I always carry my InReach with periodic location sharing enabled when I'm on backpacking trips. I also almost always carry it during international travel and road trips, but not usually with periodic location sharing. If iPhones start offering plans with periodic location sharing, I'm fairly confident that I'd stop carrying the InReach unless I was on a particularly remote trip that was outside of my comfort zone (which isn't something I really do anyway).
Some of these effects are already seen with cell phones. OTOH while no panacea, cell phones can help when someone is in genuine danger.
Genies and bottles and all that. Of course authorities may get more liberal with levying significant fines for people who get rescued because they were unprepared.
Now someone that is in a wreck or sees one can stay put and contact emergency services with a way more accurate location, and I think that's awesome.
But I get what you’re saying, if you have 2 you have 1 and if you have 1 you have none. Some redundancy so nice and the iPhone as a backup to the inreach will be a likely set up.
I'm currently wearing a Garmin Fenix 7, which recently replaced a Forerunner 645. I look forward to seeing the Ultra reviews, but it doesn't strike me as competitive yet. E.g., the 36 hours of battery life is surely exciting for Apple Watch fans, but my Fenix 7 gets 18 days of battery life. Or if I turn Battery Saver on, I get 57 days of usage vs 2.5 days for the Apple Watch Ultra.
And what really makes the Garmin stuff suited for sports is years and years of carefully designed specialist features. I'm not even much of an athlete but I really appreciate so much of what they offer.
If the price were better I could see it being a threat for Garmin's low-end models. But at $800? Even if I were an Apple fan I'd struggle at paying more money for less watch.
So I ended up getting the regular model, figuring if I ever needed solar anything, I'd come back and get the right panel for the trip. Yet another reason I'm happy to support my local REI store.
It may have been my device (older Qualcomm branded phone), but my experience seems consistent with what others report.
On the contrary, I've been very happy with the Zoleo device and service. It's been 100% reliable in all conditions even in the middle of the bush.
Communication is one-way only and there is no way to verify delivery.
I agree that this will cut into InReach sales, because it provides about 70% of the capability and it's built into your phone. That said, the two way full text messaging and confirmation of delivery are huge advantages, especially if you actually plan to use it as opposed to it being a "just in case" communication device.
It's clearly two-way.
I am not a backpacker, so maybe I am missing something but if it is JUST for emergencies what do the Paid services offer than a NOAA Registered PLB Device would not?
As for other things worth paying for: being able to text your family back home and let them know you're running a day late but everything's ok so not to report you as missing goes a long way to helping everyone involved have some peace of mind.
Coordinating pickups and getting weather updates are also big value-adds.
It will definitely be two-way.
If you need the other features then that makes a different argument but the original statement was that iPhone feature would kill these over devices because iPhone could be used to send emergency messages.
I'm surprised it's worth doing this, I'd have expected that most findmy situations it's enough to get the pile of data hours or days later when somebody has Internet access again. Like, suppose I drop my airpods out of a pocket on some mountain trail on Saturday morning, a subsequent walker's iPhone sees them, but has no WiFi of course, however on Monday they're in the office, their iPhone reports it saw my airpods, X here at T time, and that's enough that I should be able (if I want) to go back and find them.
The place you might spend longer periods with only satellite is the open ocean, but basically if you lose shit in the ocean it's fucking gone.
The use case isn’t AirPods lost in the tundra it’s your husband or wife lost in the tundra.
Apple has partnered with Globalstar to use geostationary satellites to send incredibly small amounts of data measured in bytes, not kilobytes. These satellites have only limited bandwidth, and it's very expensive. And with the antenna size and power available in a phone today, it's never going to be more than kilobytes.
SpaceX Starlink/TMobile announced a much higher-bandwidth option, but it's incredibly fleeting, lasting just a few seconds.
Starlink satellites are in very low Earth orbit, moving at 8km/second. You can't just point an antenna at it and have it work. The antenna needs to track the satellite. And it needs to have a constant line of sight free of obstructions. Starlink currently builds a very cheap phased-array antenna, but it's still ~$1,000 to manufacture, it's a couple cubic feet in volume, and it uses >100 watts.
Starlink V2 will bring very large antennas to Starlink satellites which will enable direct 5G connectivity, but that connectivity will last for a few seconds, with perhaps thirty minutes between connections.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but no one knows how to build a satellite system currently that will cause any carriers to shit their pants.
It sounded like temporary connectivity was only initially; once they have a full shell of V2 satellites I would expect constant connectivity.
I haven't read the announcement, but Globalstar's constellation is in LEO.
what most people think of as a satellite phone is indeed LEO since iridium has the lion's share of the market.
What they might be able to do is expand this to something like limited texting, or maybe down the line even non-realtime voice messaging.
Google’s Lyra codec can already get down to 3Kb/s and be reasonably audible. It’s not a stretch to imagine within a few years we’ll be able to push that to below 1Kb/s.
Taking those two things together, I think it’s fairly reasonable to assume at least text and voice are within reach.
> The screen showed a color image with high resolution. Looking at it carefully, one realized the thing was a poor evocation…. Kjet recognized Owner Limmende and Jan Skrits, her chief of staff, but they looked several years out of style. Ølvira [the ship] was matching old video with the transmitted animation cues. The actual communication channel was less that four thousand bits per second; Central was taking no chances.
> [...]
> The picture was crisp and clear, but when the figures moved it was with cartoonlike awkwardness. And some of the faces belonged to people Kjet knew had been transferred […] The processors here on the Ølvira were taking the narrow-band signal from Fleet Central, fleshing it out with detailed (and out of date) background and evoking the image shown.
If you use smaller antenna elements you must use a higher frequency, and higher frequencies are more attenuated by the earth's atmosphere (generally, when you get to THz there is a window or else visible light wouldn't be able to penetrate) so they have no chance of making it to a satellite.
If you use less elements you lose all your gain in the side lobes, as the other commenter mentioned
globalstar's existing network and licenses have nothing to do with geostationary at all.
please don't comment on things like this if you have fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of different types of mutually incompatible satellite network technology.
People already do this when communicating from the ground via amateur satellites on handheld radios. Here the fellow followed the sweep of the sky with his yagi.
(Disclaimer: casual observer at best. May be misrepresenting what I’ve heard.)
This makes me think it's less of an affordability issue, and more of where they fall along spectrum on amount of margin that can be squeezed from smaller suppliers.
https://www.t-mobile.com/news/un-carrier/t-mobile-takes-cove...
I'd also bet on Starlink to scale better than Globalstar (after they also own the fucking rockets). Add better features and innovate
Couple that with phones that will roam into satellite coverage in rural areas... there will be extensive bandwidth requirements from this newly deployed fleet. Especially in the summer...