Garmin inReach

Pros

• I will definitely continue to bring an inreach, but mostly for peace of mind.
• In a location where Inreach sent the message in about 1 minute, it had still not connected to satellite
• I notice how glued to the Inreach I am compared to everyone else, but I also love to have a little connection.
• Non-negotiable Items: inReach.
• I'm waiting impatiently for this to be the case but it's just not there yet and so I think InReach ($cough$) is pretty critical unless someone has tested their phone's capabilities.

Cons

• in a world of satellite enabled cell phones, the value and weight proposition for an inReach is tenuous at best.
• I think it’s going become hard to justify the cost (including ongoing subscription) for an InReach over a better phone, which offers far more features for the money.
• The absolute fastest I've seen my InReach deliver a message was 20 minutes. I just don't trust it at all to be able to get a message out when I actually need it. If there's any tree cover at all, it simply doesn't work
• I also carried my inreach during my trip. The battery life is great and it went down to 50% by the end of my trip. I just find inreach to be slow and it feels outdated with a max of 160 characters for messages.
• US cell service accessible throughout most of the trip. InReach is probably overkill.