Garmin 010-01879-00 InReach Mini, Lightweight and Compact Satellite Communicator, Orange

Relative to my old Spot Messenger, this is a 5 star device - that Messenger was an awful, unreliable product that Spot will no longer activate. I dropped a star because Garmin could really do just a few things in the software to make it perfect. But heres what is great:

like the size of it and no contract for its use

Went remote for 10 days for work and it was great to keep in contact with my family. Love it!

My wife bought me this tracker for when I go solo motorcycling in the mountians. She tracks me when I dont have a cell signal.

Stupid! You have to pay for a service. An SOS call should be free.

Like the size / weight in comparison to the InReach Explorer +. But its not as easy to navigate through the pages. It does seem to be faster though, maybe because its newer and possibly improved receiver.

I used this in Antarctica while climbing Vinson. It worked the whole time. I was able to send messages home and have them track my progress.

I really tried hard to make this product work. It is very user unfriendly in my opinion. The instructions are terrible lm going to return this and just take my chances outdoors. Before you all respond its not a cell phone, I know. That’s not what I intended it to be

This thing is amazing! I bought an original InReach 4 years ago. This has a screen, and is a fraction of the size. It receives messages when people when people send them. In the past, you had to send a message to get the device to check for messages. This receives a message when its sent, and has a very easy to access menu to check for messages. Sending a message without a phone isnt really that bad! Yeah, its not a touch screen smartphone, but its like T9 back in the day. Pretty simple. Finally, weather reports show up on the devices screen and the phone, and you can write custom messages from a linked smart phone. This thing is great!

First off, sorry, this turned into a bit of a monster write up, but I thought it important to give a bit of background info. This all happened a while back, I just never got around to writing a review.