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Garmin Inreach Explorer+ capsule review.

1) What is it?
Handheld device which sends SMS-type messages anywhere in the world using the Iridium satellite network.

Bluetooth link to a phone app to write them, or mash a joystick. Also has maps. Not cheap: I worry, so I bought it.

2) How is it to use?
One part old school Garmin mapping device, one part bluetooth satellite pager. Using this thing is constant exercise in working inside of ancient legacy software concepts strapped on to an amazing amazing hardware device. The pager tech is from *pagers* yadig

3) So the place where this is most tellingly screwed up is the "sync" ecology. The Garmin website gives you maps, and an interface to create waypoints. You push these maps to the device **with a cable**. Gigabytes.

But, you say, bluetooth?

Nope. It doesn't even sync waypoints.

4) So the bluetooth connection is to the *pager* side of the app. Here the main quibbles are namespace management: how does it do addresses?

It will write to Twitter and Facebook Pages, but not DMs. It will write to SMS and email, but has NOREPLY. Messages are sent by website.

5) It does something clever for hiking use: three standard messages, with fixed recipients, which you can send for free. Why 3 and not 9? Business model. It charges for incoming messages, too: send address is secret. Don't get spammed!

Compose on app and send, or mash a joystick

6) So the product exists inside of an ecology: pager guys made a satellite pager, and built a pager app. Handheld GPS guys did their thing. Extreme sports types pushed for twitter and facebook updates.

"Expedition" mode is $50 a month for unlimited everything. Inflexible plans.

7) Taking things out of their product ecologies typically causes tons of pain. Somebody, somewhere wants to load a key pair on to this things and use it as a satellite-based bitcoin wallet.

All the hardware is there to do it. Ditto a twitter client.

Free Software + byte pricing

8) Weirdly enough, what this thing needs to sing is crypto currency. I can send to your device, and pay the charges for the messages on my end. I can pull down bytes, and have the sender pay. I can have people send me byte-sending-tokens over the sky wires.

Totally different now

9) So why do I own this thing? Answer: Iridium, Inmarsat etc. will stay up in almost any scenario. The only thing which would knock this over is a Carrington Event or similar astronomical phenomena.

Civilian users might get blocked, but the militaries will keep these things up.

10) I don't see #COVID19 as a realistic threat to the internet. I do, however, think that it is rapidly eroding our global resilience to the point where *one more big shock* might shatter the internet into balkanized areas - city-wide nets with slow links between them, perhaps.

11) In that situation, just finding address information for your friends becomes a real challenge. But the hardware, and probably the software, around satellite communication systems will stay up. I think there is a *reasonable* chance that if you have satcom you'll stay in touch

12) And, if we were in a hell of a hurry, Iridium and Garmin could open the APIs and the firmware, and we could very quickly push these systems to the full limit of both terrestrial and celestial hardware. Including a payment rail.

Incumbent, contract-based systems hold us back!

13) We could literally rip apart the patents, contracts, and copyright around these systems wide open by (say) military government fiat, *OR* pitch a new business model to Garmin and Iridium for the world we all now live in.

All global systems are like this, freight to phones.

14) So let me point to something here: the faster we can adapt the technology and business arrangements around our globe spanning systems to adapt them to the environment we are now in, the more resilient they will be, and the more profitable because they solve our real problems.