Iridium Communications and Qualcomm Technologies are partnering on the Snapdragon Satellite platform that will enable emergency services and texting via satellite on smartphones using the Snapdragon system on a chip (SoC).
Snapdragon Satellite is expected to be available on premium Android smartphones during the second half of the year. It will have access to the entire Iridium satellite constellation. Snapdragon Satellite-equipped smartphones will be capable of sending messages and texting from anywhere on earth with a view of open sky, Iridium said.
The collaboration will extend beyond a single smartphone manufacturer and eventually could be integrated into other devices, such as vehicles, consumer devices and devices connected by the IoT.
Satellite Texting
“While some have been expecting we would be integrating our system into a specific smartphone, what we’ve done is so much bigger,” Iridium CEO Matt Desch said in a press release. Working with a mobile technology leader such as Qualcomm Technologies and their powerful Snapdragon platforms allows Iridium to serve the smartphone industry horizontally – and offers us an opportunity to enable other consumer and vehicular applications in the future. This supports our larger vision of connecting people and things on the move, anywhere!”
Qualcomm and Iridium are not the only companies working in this area. Last November, for instance, Apple said that emergency SOS transmission via satellite functionality would be available on the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro. The service, which it said would become available that month, was the result of a $450 million investment from its Advanced Manufacturing Fund. A majority of that funding went to Globalstar, a satellite service based in Covington, LA.
A month earlier, SpaceX and T-Mobile said that they would use a slice of T-Mobile’s mid-band spectrum to support connectivity between cellphones and SpaceX’s low earth orbiting (LEO) satellites.