I remember being at a telecommunications expo a couple of years ago and seeing the phones for the first time. They reminded me of Maxwell Smart talking into his shoe. In a world where we've all gotten used to talking into something the size and heft of a pack of cards, the brick-like Iridium phone had serious limitations. You had to hold it just right. It didn't work indoors.
Calls cost dollars per minute.
And to top it all off, it had no data capability. As the Internet becomes more and more important in our daily lives, a new breed of portable devices is on the drawing boards. All that is coming to a wireless device near you. But Irridium had no growth path to allow any of those features. To make portable phones that small work reliably, you have to have a pretty dense array of cel-sites.