CES 2023 continues to churn out new things. The last one is Snapdragon Satellitesatellite service capable of offering SOS messages with two-way communication for smartphones.
This service will guarantee a global coverage thanks to the support of the Iridium satellite system, a rival of the Globalstar company which provides support to Apple for the Emergency SOS function. However, at the moment only devices that mount the platform Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 will be able to enjoy this new feature.
The purpose of Snapdragon Satellite is quite immediate to understand, as it can be extremely useful if you get lost in the woods, in isolated mountains, off the coast or in all those places where the “normal” cell phone signal generally it does not arrive. Here in these situations, through Snapdragon Satellite there will be the possibility to send an SOS message to receive help in a few seconds.
As was shown by Qualcomm, the smartphone must be, however, necessarily facing the open sky, this means that the service will not be available in underground or closed locations. Regarding the possibility of making calls, Qualcomm has not expressed itself at the moment, but it is likely that this alternative will also be integrated over time.
“Solid, reliable connectivity is at the heart of high-end experiences. Satellite Snapdragon showcases our history of leadership in enabling global satellite communications and our ability to bring superior innovations to mobile devices at scale“, he has declared Durga Malladisenior vice president and general manager of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.”Coming to high-end smartphones later this year, this new addition to our Snapdragon platform allows us to enable satellite communication service on more and more device categories”.
Going to see some technical characteristics, it must be remembered that Snapdragon Satellite collaborates with all the characteristics of the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 platform, i.e. with the powerful Sanpdragon X70 5G RF-Modem which will support 5G connectivity Not–Terrestrial Networks (NTN) and geolocation and will also take advantage of the network card Qualcomm Fast Connect 7800 with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth. Furthermore, Qualcomm’s plan is to make this satellite service available not only for smartphones, but also for tablets and laptops in the near future.
Regarding the launch of the service, we only know that it will be available in the second half of 2023 and only in a few selected regions. Be that as it may, it will be only, for now, for Android smartphones with Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 in North America and Europe.
“Garmin welcomes the opportunity to expand our proven satellite emergency response services to millions of new smartphone users worldwide“, he has declared Brad Trenkle, vice president of Garmin. “Garmin Response supports thousands of SOS incidents every year and has already saved many lives in the process and we look forward to partnering with Qualcomm Technologies and Iridium to help people connect to emergency services wherever life takes them”.
Qualcomm’s is a pretty cool idea that could literally make the difference between life and death in some life situations. The only limitation is that, at least at launch, this two-way messaging service will only be available to owners of high-end Android smartphones.
