I have seen this pop up a couple of times:

Bear Tooth

Just looking for the normal thoughtful comments for the widely diverse crew here.

The utility of a communications device is, if I recall correctly, equivalent to the square of the number of people who can be reached using it.

A telephone system with one person on it is useless. A telephone system with two people on it is of limited value. A telephone system by which you can instantly reach over a billion people is very valuable indeed.

When cellphones were new, they would have been nearly useless if they weren't integrated into the already well-established landline phone system. Now, I understand there are more mobile phones than landline phones, people are more reachable now than they were thirty years ago, and the system is even more valuable than it used to be.

I can see Beartooth being very useful if you bring friends with you who have and use Beartooth. Otherwise, I suspect that you'll do better with FRS. If the area you're operating in has Ham radio repeater coverage, you'll do even better.

A ten mile range is pretty limiting for situations in which I might employ such a device. What is its capability for transmitting photos? That would also be important...

Looks like something that will go after the FRS/GMRS market. My limited experience in that spectrum with typical Moto radios is that it's very noisy. This may be a much better/clearer option -- and it carries text too.

Interesting if you were setting up something like a neighborhood or community group.

I think I'd hold off until they're released, then you can determine which is superior, beartooth or GoTenna (which seems to be available now) based on user review.

If you're urgently in need of such a device, I guess you're stuck with GoTenna. I think I prefer the gotenna because it seems (not 100% sure here) to operate around 150Mhz as opposed to beartooth operating around 900Mhz.

That said, I'm pretty happy with the performance of my small handheld radios, so I'll stick with those for now.