4.5 hours for any terrestrial based satcom solution is insane. At this point, the battery tech alone with these power requirements is stuff that Garmin, Viasat and Honeywell could only dream of obtaining in the same quantities.

Distance alone isn’t the real issue (newer Pixel phones can talk to GEO, which is 100 times farther out than Starlink in LEO!), data rate over distance is.

It's not inherently because of space, it's because phased array antennas are just very power hungry. Most of the link budget is coming from the satellites huge antenna, the mini has a comparatively tiny aperture

They have to be able to actively melt snow too, which makes the draw much higher.