Smart move. As a Verizon/Android customer, I'm a little miffed that my carrier is going with ASTS's quasi-vaporware over the proven Starlink constellation - baking support into the OS avoids unhappy customers and loaded *'s next to features.
So T-Mobile is partnering with Starlink to let people send SMS. This is insanely impressive, you could be in the middle of nowhere, and send an emergency text that otherwise would have gone nowhere.
With do they have to partner up with T-Mobile if the iPhones will directly communicate with Starlink satellites? Wouldn't piggybacking off the Wi-Fi call technology be enough and less friction for customers?<p>I don't think it would be unreasonable to require customers to have a really cheap mobile plan with no internet if they want to do calls outside of iMessager/WhatsApp/Messenger/etc.
Garmin's smartwatch line and SOS communicators now have a massive target on their back. Now that the satellite availability issues are going to be solved, they just need to push battery life further for the watches and they'll be golden.<p>There will be no point other than simplicity / physical buttons to get a Garmin watch over an Apple watch if you have an iPhone pretty soon.<p>Garmin w/ eink screen, not great app, bad Apple compatibility = $300, latest AW series 10 = $380
> Latest iPhone update poised to work with upcoming service<p>Um well yeah the whole idea of starlink direct to cell is that it works with unmodified mobile phones so this isn't really a suprise.<p>What surprises me more is that apple is even working with starlink considering they have a competing service together with globalstar. Which is kinda their moat since all attempts on the Android side have failed (qualcomm had a deal with iridium and killed it within the year before it even launched, and bullitt (CAT/Motorola) which had a deal with Inmarsat went bankrupt. The sat part was spun off but without ongoing hardware releases this will be a dead end.
Do I understand it correctly, that the satellite communicates with a ground station and the ground station communicates with the phones?<p>It's not that the phone communicates directly with the satellite, right?