Yesterday, the Samsung Galaxy S25, S25+ and S25 Ultra were launched with the new Snapdragon 8 Elite for Galaxy chip. Interestingly, in an official document published by Qualcomm today, they announced that the Galaxy S25 series is the first in the world to support the Snapdragon Satellite communication feature.
Snapdragon Satellite was announced two years ago via the Snapdragon X75 modem. It allows sending and receiving SMS messages using satellites. Although Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, Motorola, Honor and Nothing were the first to say they would support this feature, it was never included in their released devices. In China, the satellite communication system supported by Oppo, Honor and Huawei uses a different technology that only supports Chinese satellites.
When announced at MWC, Snapdragon Satellite was announced with support from satellite communication company Iridium but the cooperation ended in 2023. At last year's Snapdragon Summit, we had the opportunity to ask Qualcomm representatives about the future of this technology. They simply said that they were working with several undisclosed manufacturing companies.
We now know it's Samsung, but it's not known when the company will activate the satellite SMS system that is now supported built-in to Android 15.