Iridium GO! Email with SatPhone.Me

Hi everyone,
We've had an Iridium GO! aboard for six months now and have been cruising for a month.  We've become increasingly dissatisfied with the email app provided by Iridium.  We looked around and with PredictWind's advice selected SatPhone.Me.

SatPhone.Me is sold by SatphoneStore, the company which provides the GO! units and airtime contracts to PredictWind.  SatPhone.Me uses the well-known XGATE software from Global Marine Networks.

Satphone.Me  (XGATE) App

For us, the issues with the Iridium Mail & Web app included:

• Only available on iOS and Android (not Windows or Mac OS X)
• Not integrated with native email apps on supported devices
• Poor quality overall with frequent crashes

The only Iridium GO! app which has been reliable for us has been PredictWind's Offshore app.  This allows us to obtain PredictWind GRIBs and other weather data, but not all the data we'd like.

We find the lack of integration of Iridium Mail with our normal email very frustrating.  SatPhone.Me has proved to be the answer.  We have been using it for a while now and it is great.  As they say, "it just works".  We now forward all our normal email to our SatPhone.Me account without problems.  We didn't dare do so with Iridium Mail & Web due to its frequent crashes.

For us, the advantages of Satphone.Me  include:

• Supported on Mac OS X
• Integrates with Mac OS X mail app
• Automatically uses existing network connectivity when present, otherwise uses the GO!
• Manages "big mail" well
• Allows us to send and receive any attachments we want direct from/to our laptops
• Stable and reliable

A Satphone.Me account costs about $100/year which is great value for us.  It is allowing us to get far more use (=value) out of our GO!  We really like the GO! and with SatPhone.Me it is now delivering everything we hoped for.