The Defy Satellite link gives any Android or iPhone an instant upgrade with the ability to send and receive text messages via satellite, solving the problem of mobile dead zones for emergencies and wilderness adventures.

Announced ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and produced by the British phone manufacturer Bullitt under the Motorola brand, the Satellite link connects to a normal smartphone via Bluetooth and uses an app to send not only SOS messages but general two-way chat via texts.

The lightweight, credit card-sized puck will ship from about April, costing £99 on its own or £149 when bundled with 30 messages a month and an SOS assistance service from FocusPoint for the first year. It connects to geostationary satellites via a new MediaTek chip to send SMS to regular phones with replies sent using the cross-platform Bullitt Satellite Messenger app. A button on the side can also send an SOS alert with location without needing to connect to a smartphone.

​Alongside the puck, Bullitt also announced the Cat S75 rugged smartphone, which has the same satellite communications system built into it, costing £549. The Android is the continuation of Bullitt’s long-running rugged phone business aimed at first responders, rural workers and off-grid hobbyists.

Happy Presidents Day! We wanted to share with you a few presidential facts that relate to our modern, technological world.

​Who was the First President to Have his Voice Recorded?

During his first year in presidency in 1889, Benjamin Harrison used a phonograph wax cylinder to record his speech regarding the first Pan-American Congress. The speech is now the oldest surviving recording of a president’s voice. While Rutherford B. Hayes did record a speech several years prior, it was sadly lost.

Who was the First President to Use a Telegraph?

The 1844, invention of the telegraph baffled both the American people and government up until Abraham Lincoln’s presidency in the 1860s. During his term, Lincoln used the telegraph frequently to communicate with generals during the Civil War.

In 1866, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson installed the first telegraph room in the White House so that he could efficiently relay urgent messages.

Who was the First President to Have a Phone?

In May 1877, Rutherford B. Hayes was the first president to install a telephone in the White House’s telegraph room. For his first call, he called the inventor of the phone, Alexander Graham Bell, who was located 13 miles away.
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President Herbert Hoover installed the first telephone in the Oval Office in 1929, to enable the power of communications right at the president’s desk.

​​But a century ago, the operator functioned as Google. Everyone knew it as “Information.”

“The operator was the internet before the internet. There’s a wonderful circularity there,” said Josh Lauer, an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire who is writing a book on the cultural history of the telephone.

Operator services were a selling point to customers during the late 1800s and early 1900s. The operator was the essential link in the dominant Bell System, owned by American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T), telecommunications network. 

The operator became the early face of the telephone, a human behind an emerging and complex technology. The job came to be occupied mostly by single, middle-class White women, often known as “Hello Girls.” The Bell System, known as Ma Bell, advertised its mostly female ranks of operators as servile and attentive – “The Voice with a Smile” – to attract and maintain customers. 

Well into the 20th century, AT&T offered weather, bus schedules, sports scores, time and date, election results and other information requests. 

“Telephone users interpreted her as an efficient way to locate any information,” wrote Emily Goodmann, an assistant professor of communication at Clarke University, in her 2019 paper on the history of telephone operators.