[wkat4242]

The mate 60 uses beidou sats which are not quite geostationary but also in a pretty high orbit.

But messaging is only a small part of their task, the main one is geolocation. They're only able to supply short message service where latency isn't really relevant.

[chrismorgan]

I’m out of my depth here, but my research said Tiantong-1 and that that’s geostationary. Adding the keyword BeiDou I do get a few results too, but it looks like BeiDou is GNSS, so I think those might be errors?

Anyway, my point was just that this stuff isn’t equivalent to Starlink. For what satellite phones do, GEO or whatever similar is fine, but the appeal of Starlink certainly requires that it be LEO.

[wkat4242]

I didn't look into it but I read that in a review, that BeiDou-3 sats have a sidechannel for emergency comms and that this is what's being used. Perhaps that info was wrong, it's hard to get info on this in Europe.

If this is the case it would be too bad though, because Tiantong-1 is indeed geostationary (leading to suitability issues for emergency comms like needing visibility to the Southern horizon) but also only available in the China region.