LAS VEGAS — In a broad stretch of desert 30 minutes from the glitz of the Strip, Qualcomm vice president Francesco Grilli pecks out a message on a partly translucent brick of a smartphone, then holds it up to the sky. Moments later, the text he just sent arrives on his other, more conventional phone.
The scene was, honestly, a little dull. But that’s because the interesting part — the satellite that received the text and routed it to a normal phone — was out of sight, about 485 miles overhead.
Tucked away inside that brick were the same satellite connectivity parts that will appear in a wave of new smartphones starting in the second half of 2023. (Don’t worry: They won’t be any chunkier than usual.) And unlike Apple’s iPhones, which offer satellite service only in case of emergency, devices that use Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Satellite technology will be able to send standard text messages via satellite to anyone — not just emergency responders, Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said in an interview with The Washington Post.
“For you to be able to say, ‘No matter where I am, I can send a message and I am connected,’ I think that’s powerful,” he said.
This push into satellite communications — powered by a partnership with Iridium Communications, which operates a constellation of 66 satellites — isn’t a new concept.
Apple’s Emergency SOS via satellite feature is live in six countries. A partnership between T-Mobile and Elon Musk’s SpaceX is expected to bear fruit sometime this year, and AT&T is exploring phone-to-satellite connectivity with an outfit called AST SpaceMobile.
The catch with some of those satellite features is that they have built-in audiences — you have to be an iPhone owner or pay T-Mobile for your wireless service. Qualcomm and Iridium’s vision is a little different: Any phone maker that buys the former’s premium chipsets for its devices can pay a little extra to connect to the latter’s satellites.
And because Qualcomm’s chipsets are commonly used in smartphones made by Samsung, Motorola and other brands sold around the world, many more people will be able to fire off messages from cellular dead zones starting this year.
But that’s not to say anyone with a Qualcomm-powered phone will get to try this feature. To start, it will be ava
