A photojournalist tested out IsatPhone Pro’s credentials when he took Inmarsat’s global handheld satellite phone on a road trip through one of the world’s last great wildernesses, the Kimberley region of Western Australia covering nearly 164,000 square miles.
Neerav Bhatt, whose Rambling Thoughts technology blog is one of the most popular in Australia, decided to see how iSatPhone Pro would cope with the heat and dust in the continent’s remote north-west frontier.
For travellers and those who live in the Kimberley region, satellite communications can be the only reliable method of contacting the outside world.
So Neerav was keen to investigate the satellite phone’s affordability as well.
Before being supplied with an IsatPhone Pro by Inmarsat he admitted: “I expected it to be big, heavy and thought the phone and usage costs would be quite expensive.”
But, as he recorded in his blog: “Surprisingly, the phone handset is not huge – it’s comparable to an early-generation cordless home phone – and the cost of buying an IsatPhone Pro in Australia is quite comparable to the cost of buying a mid- to high-end 3G smartphone on a prepay account.
“I found calls to landlines were more reliable and had better audio quality than calls to mobile phones.”