Huawei Mate 60 series will reportedly take smartphone satellite connectivity to the next level

Last year, within hours of each other, Huawei and Apple announced satellite connectivity for their new phones. Huawei announced that the Mate 50 and Mate 50 Pro can send short emergency text messages via China's BeiDou satellite network in areas where there is no cellular connectivity. Apple announced its Emergency SOS via Satellite feature for all four of its iPhone 14 models.

While we have no idea whether Huawei's satellite feature has been successfully deployed in the real world, we know that there have been several incidents where Apple's feature has saved some lives. For example, there were two women in British Columbia who were driving to Alberta and were stranded due to the weather. Thanks to the Emergency SOS via Satellite, rescuers were able to find the women. Rescuers said that if not for the feature, the victims would have been stranded for a week without cellular connectivity. They might have succumbed to the harsh conditions they were in.

Another success story saw Apple's Emergency SOS via Satellite save a trio of pre-graduates from Brigham Young University who found themselves stuck inside a canyon in Utah for three hours in freezing water. Not only was there no cellular connectivity, but one of the students went into hypothermic shock frightening the other two. Luckily, one of them had an iPhone 14 and contacted an Apple ground station by satellite. The station relayed the message to the appropriate first responders and three lives were saved.

While Samsung and Google are expected to be among the first Android phones to offer satellite connectivity (possibly as soon as this October's Pixel 8 line), a fresh report says that Huawei is going to take the next generation of smartphone satellite connectivity to a much higher level. According to GizmoChina, Huawei's Mate 60 flagship series (it's second of the year after the P60 line) will employ power amplifier (PA) chips made by chipmakers in China.

These chips are developed specifically to connect with the Tiantong-1 satellite mobile communication system which delivers voice and image transmission, precise positioning, and more. While PA chips are used on the foldable Mate X3 and the P60 flagship series to support the two-way SMS service by satellite supported by those Huawei phones, the Mate 60 and Mate 60 Pro will use non-Huawei designed PA chips that might allow those with the handsets to make voice calls by satellite.

If that is the case, Huawei will have leapfrogged over Apple since iPhone users are still forced to use a limited SMS platform to get an Apple-run call center to get in touch with rescuers. Eventually, Apple probably would like to open up the satellite system and allow it to be used for mindless chit-chat via SMS and voice over satellite. You can be sure that Apple will be looking to charge for the satellite connectivity by the time this becomes a possibility.