Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra slaps iPhone 14 with Satellite Call, without hardware

Apple brought satellite communication technology to smartphones, starting with its iPhone 14 series. Since iPhone 14 brings satellite SMS feature with hardware integration, Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra becomes with world’s first phone to successfully make a call through satellite, without hardware installed.

Since the latest Samsung Galaxy S23 series lacks satellite communication hardware, it’s great to see that the last year’s Galaxy S22 Ultra used to make a satellite call from Texas to Japan. Apple and Huawei’s flagships offer just SMS via satellite, but S22 Ultra went beyond that.

Galaxy S22 Ultra made call via satellite

According to BusinessWire, AST SpaceMobile partnered with AT&T to make satellite call using an unmodified smartphone. The testers picked Galaxy S22 Ultra to perform the operation of creating history as the phone doesn’t have integrated hardware to do so.

Using the BlueWalker 3 satellite, the unmodified Galaxy S22 Ultra successfully achieved the honor of making the world’s first voice call to a destination (Japan), which is far away. As the test is considered successful, we may see various regular phones feature satellite calls in the near future.

“AST SpaceMobile, Inc. today announced the successful completion of the first-ever two-way voice calls, directly to everyday unmodified smartphones using the BlueWalker 3 (“BW3”) satellite.

The first voice call was made from the Midland, Texas area to Rakuten in Japan over AT&T spectrum using a Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone.”

This is the first time anyone has ever achieved a direct voice connection from space to everyday cellular devices, demonstrating a significant advancement in AST SpaceMobile’s mission to provide connectivity to the nearly 50% of the global population who remain unconnected from cellular broadband.

AST SpaceMobile’s satellite connectivity technology will make it easier to spread the network’s reach to areas that are disconnected currently. Moreover, it will end the need for expensive network infrastructure like towers and wired connectivity to expand the network’s reach.

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