That is very cool... I remember walking into an Iridium store back in the day trying to think of way to justify a purchase of one of the phones to tinker with (I couldn't come up with a rationale). Can't think of a pressing need for a RockBLOCK either, but it's a neat device.

Nice to see that the iridium fiasco has resulted in some long tail utility

edit: here's a page with a proof of concept with an arduino hookup: http://makezine.com/projects/make-37/iridiumsatellite/