Washington: It seems like South Korean tech giant Samsung is ready to follow in the footsteps of Apple by bringing satellite communication ability to their smartphones.
According to GSM Arena, Samsung is now said to be working with Iridium, a 66-strong Low Earth orbit satellite constellation which provides voice and data services, to bring satellite communications to the Galaxy S23 family. Apple has its Emergency SOS feature that works via satellite on the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro lines, which works through a partnership with Globalstar.
For the past two years, Samsung has been working on overcoming the technical challenges of bringing satellite communications to smartphones.
It looks like the company finally managed to do this because, with the launch of the Galaxy S23 family, rumour has it that users will be able to send text messages and small images (in the hundreds of kbps) via satellite, reported GSM Arena.
Those who have seen a dedicated satellite phone might understand that the main challenge was to miniaturize the antenna so that it can be mounted into a regular smartphone without doubling its size.
Samsung doesn’t expect this feature to take off in its home turf in Korea since the land area there is small and it’s very well covered with 5G service.
However, it can be a real success in North and South America, Europe, Russia, and China, especially in those parts where infrastructure isn’t very well developed.
As per GSM Arena, previous leaks and rumours suggest that the Galaxy S23 family will exclusively use a higher-binned version of Qualcomm’s recently unveiled Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset, and the launch is going to take place in the first week of February.
