Hiking? Probably not very useful since you must be within Bluetooth range and you can whisper to your chat partner.

If you're hiking in the remote area youre much better off with LoRaWAN or amateur radio transceivers anyway.

I dunno, I bet if it was widespread people could come up with applications. Like, telling people doesn’t necessarily leave a record, so you could talk about tomorrow’s plans and then send a summary text so everyone has a record and all the details.

“Coded PHY” Bluetooth has a range of up to a kilometer! Once you add mesh forwarding, you could probably cover quite some distance on moderately busy hikes.