The iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro series have just been announced, and while they have new features related to eSIM and photography, another new feature is emergency SOS via satellite calling. This means you can send a signal to call for help no matter where you are, even in remote areas where you don’t have a mobile data signal. There are a number of different technologies Apple has developed to make this work, eliminating the need for bulky hardware to communicate with a satellite above your head. It’s included with every iPhone 14 free for two years and will launch in the US and Canada in November.
How Apple’s Emergency SOS will work by instructing you to point your phone toward the satellite. The company has developed a custom algorithm to compress text so that messages can be sent faster than ever before to a satellite. Apple also said it has worked with emergency experts to develop a list of the most frequently asked emergency questions so that you can simply click an answer to a question instead of having to type the full nature of your emergency. This means you can get help faster than ever before.
You can also use the Find My app to manually share your location via satellite. How this will work when you can’t move the phone to point it at a satellite isn’t clear, though we’re assuming we’ll hear more from the company as we get closer to its emergency SOS launch. It has also not been confirmed which satellites Apple will use for this feature, and whether or not it will use Starlink. Regardless, though, this is a pretty big security feature that could save lives in the future, and we look forward to learning more about how it works.
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