[goleary]

debatable...lots of people with iphones still use watches and ereaders.

and for a life saving device like this i know a subset of people will not want it a part of their phone.

...but this will definitely take a LOT of business from garmin because i believe that subset to be pretty small.

[frio]

As someone who hikes (well, it's NZ, so, tramps) a fair bit, we'll continue taking our PLB with us (we opted for a 406MHz PLB rather than the Garmin solutions because we didn't want to find out in a life-threatening situation that our credit cards had expired a month ago and we couldn't call for help!). You're right, a dedicated device is pretty mandatory for true life threatening situations, and we always have a bevy of safety equipment on harder tramps.

With that said, the iPhone (Pro?) is becoming somewhat of a swiss army knife for casual tramping: offline maps with GPS and a compass, an excellent set of cameras, an ereader, excellent battery life to back all that up _and_ it can now communicate with the rest of the world in non-life threatening -- but marginal -- situations. As an example, we leave intentions with people whenever we leave ("here is our route, if we're not back by midday on the third, contact SAR"); being able to message people and say "hey, I've rolled my ankle, we're safe but will be late because we're limping out, don't worry" is a pretty excellent feature.

We're probably a niche market, but several friends in that community are pretty excited about this feature. For 2-3 day trips, this makes the outdoors much more accessible.