Samsung seems to be ready to draw inspiration once again from Apple and follow in the footsteps of the American company when it comes to bringing satellite communication to smartphones. Apple has its own satellite-operated Emergency SOS feature on the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro lines, which works through a partnership with Globalstar, and Samsung is now said to be working with Iridium to bring satellite communications to the Galaxy S23 family.
Iridium is a constellation of 66 low-Earth orbit satellites that provide voice and data services. Samsung has been working on overcoming the technical challenges of bringing satellite communications to smartphones for the past couple of years and it seems to have finally succeeded, since with the launch of the Galaxy S23 family, it is said that you will be able to send text messages and small images (of the order of hundreds of kbps) via satellite.
As you’d expect if you’ve ever seen a dedicated satellite phone, the main challenge was miniaturizing the antenna so it could be fitted to a regular smartphone without doubling its size.
Samsung doesn’t expect this feature to take off in its territory in Korea as the land area is small and it is very well covered by 5G service, but it thinks it could be very successful in North and South America, Europe, Russia and China especially in those parts where the infrastructure is not very developed.
According to previous rumors and leaks, the Galaxy S23 family will exclusively use a higher version of the recently unveiled Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset from Qualcomm and the launch will take place in the first week of February.
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