My garmin inreach mini died

Mine hasn’t died yet, but I have tested my iPhone for satellite messaging. It does work, but requires some TLC to acquire the low earth orbit satellites and I found that it didn’t work very well in some locations, because you need line-of-sight. I like the phone as a back up, but the InReach is still superior IMO.

Then maybe I’ll just be lazy and keep my inreach mini and current phone for the time being.

I also have the mini and have thought about upgrading but haven’t. It’s worked so far but I’ve worried as it got older that something like a battery or other failure might occur. I’ve used the satellite messaging on my iPhone 14 and it worked. The don’t think it’s on par with a working InReach.

My inreach mini wouldn’t keep a charge for very long so I replaced the battery.  It was a bit of a challenge but youtube video made it pretty clear.  It’s more difficult than just replacing a regular battery.

Bit the bullet and got the Mini 3+ and it’s really something else. Slightly bigger and heavier but my texts typically go through in seconds. Images in a minute or two. Note the 3+ uses the more recent Iridium Next constellation and the plain 3 doesn’t, which is weird so I think the extra $50 is worth it. Love the touch screen and voice commands enough to actually use it stand alone for messages. OG Mini was famously painful to use stand alone. Voice messages is really neat too.

Stuff I don’t like: The image sharing is cool but the receiving side needs to download the Garmin Messenger or Explore to see them, so that’s dumb.

And Garmin has purposely hamstrung the built-in map app. There is no technological reason for it not to actually have a map background overlay. The screen has decent resolution and is full color. Pure rent seeking IMHO.

I think it’s the best device out there until on-phone sat gets more developed. Even then, this thing lives unprotected on my chest and has floated in lakes, something I wouldn’t want to do with a phone so I’ll probably milk it for a decade or so. I thought it was a worthy upgrade for the network speed and security alone.