satellite connectivity

Samsung president TM Roh says the company is waiting for satellite connectivity to be “ready” before adopting it on the Galaxy smartphone line.

Speaking to CNET ahead of the February 1st Galaxy S23 launch, Roh suggested it was too early, with satellite connectivity on phones still being fairly limited.

“When there is the right timing, infrastructure and the technology [is] ready, then of course for Samsung Galaxy, for our mobile division, we would also actively consider adopting this feature as well,” said Roh.

Samsung’s decision not to ship satellite features in the new Galaxy S23 devices comes as a surprise given the company’s penchant for packing just about every feature you can imagine into its devices and trying out new features — even if they’re far from being ready — just to see if people like them.

It also puts us in the rare position where Apple was first to pioneer a new feature with Samsung waiting for it to be “ready” before shipping it.

Anyway, Galaxy fans may not have to wait long. Qualcomm recently announced its ‘Snapdragon Satellite’ feature that will enable satellite connectivity on the latest Snapdragon chips later this year. Notably, Samsung’s new Galaxy S23 series run on the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 for Galaxy, which likely will be one of the chips to support Snapdragon Satellite when it launches.

Still, Roh doesn’t seem totally convinced, telling CNET that he doesn’t believe satellite “is the end-all or be-all of the solutions to ensure peace of mind among users.” Instead, Roh pointed to Samsung’s other efforts to improve communications, such as enhancing the sensors inside its phones and broadening 5G coverage.

Source: CNET Via: 9to5Google

Perhaps one of the most interesting things to come out of the September Apple event was how wrong everyone was.

The lead-up to the September 14th Apple event, like so many other anticipated announcements, was full of leaks and rumours about all the new things Apple would announce. To leakers’ credit, some things were bang on. Unfortunately, so many other rumours were very, very off. That’s the game you play with leaks.

What was particularly surprising, however, was that some very prominent figures were incredibly wrong about one big rumour: satellite iPhone capabilities. Although I wouldn’t call myself a prominent figure, I was also quite wrong.

As a quick refresher, the satellite iPhone rumour started when analyst Ming-chi Kuo reported that the iPhone 13’s modem would support band n53, a ground-based chunk of spectrum largely owned by satellite operator Globalstar. Several publications picked up the news and it seemed that ‘iPhone 13 will support band n53’ became ‘iPhone 13 will support Globalstar.’ That, in turn, became ‘iPhone 13 will have satellite capabilities.’

PC Mag‘s Sascha Segan initially offered the explanation that this was all about band n53 support and the satellite portion of the rumour was, well, a bit of broken telephone. However, Bloomberg’s reliable Mark Gurman later reported that Apple was considering satellite features. Gurman published a detailed look at the satellite capabilities but stressed that they likely would arrive in a later iPhone.

Now that Apple has revealed its iPhone 13 and 13 Pro models, it’s clear that these rumours were even more wrong than previously thought. Segan pointed out in a new article about the rumour mill that the iPhone 13 doesn’t even support band n53, which kicked off this whole saga.

Again, that’s the danger of playing the rumour game. Sometimes, the rumours are wrong — the more you buy into them, the more it hurts when things don’t turn out as expected. However, the number of people who got it wrong going into the iPhone 13 launch remains surprising and has me wondering if there isn’t more going on here.

Perhaps Apple shared false information to root out leaks. That may sound farfetched, but back in August a report indicated Apple had a double agent in the iPhone leaks and jailbreak community for over a year — it’s not that hard to believe the company would purposely disseminate false information to catch leakers. Segan also suggested that there could be a darker side to the saga, potentially in the form of a ‘pump-and-dump’ scheme. Globalstar’s stock did jump significantly following the initial report.

Either way, perhaps this will be a lesson of sorts to reporters, fans and everyone else that leaks can get things wrong.