Where Have All the Pagers Gone? 584
Posted
by
kdawson
from the long-time-paging dept.
from the long-time-paging dept.
oddRaisin writes "After recently sleeping through a page for work, I decided to change my paging device from my BlackBerry (which is quiet and has a pathetic vibrate mode) to an actual pager. After looking at the websites of Cingular, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, I'm left scratching my head and wondering where all the pagers went. I can't find them or any mention of them. Pagers of yore offered some great features that reflected the serious nature of being paged. They were loud. They had good vibrate modes. They continued to alert after a page until you acknowledged them. I didn't have to differentiate between a text from a friend and a page from work. Now that pagers seem to have become passé, what are other people doing to fill this niche? Are some phones better pagers than others? Are there still paging service providers out there?"
Re:The 80s called (Score:3, Insightful)
lmfao.
my hokey pokey town had pagers in the early 2000s.. kinda hilarious.
i dunno wtf you need a pager for if you have a cell phone. Get a nice cell that does all the bells and whistles YOU desire and you're gtg.
Why don't you get a second cellphone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course since is
Software problem (Score:3, Insightful)
It looks like the 'features' you are missing can be solved by software. Now that Google has opened the door for truly customizable phones you could write an app that would ring really loudly until you acknowledge the page/sms/email based on filtering rules.
If you really want an actual pager, just try a popular search engine, you'll find plenty of stores that sell them.
Change (sms/text) ringtone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mabybe you need to assign a different ring-tone to your work numbers ?
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:2, Insightful)
You're right. Because most carriers don't charge you to listen to your voicemail, and being able to have messages left when your phone is turned off is a stupid feature anyway.
Battery Life (Score:4, Insightful)
You also didn't have to recharge your pager once a night. I remember two AA batteries going for months in my old pager.
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:3, Insightful)
And ya know what? People just don't listen. Especially the annoying lusers who you are most likely to have trying to reach you at the worst time. Once they know that you have a cell, they demand the number. Then the firm gives it to them. Then they call you all the goddamn time whether they've been told not to or not. And since the calls are routed through a pbx, there's no way to tell from the caller id if it's some annoying luser or somebody you should actually talk to until you answer the call and then it's too late.
A pager provides a narrow bandwidth channel for people to send only a small, simple message. Enough for genuine problems, not enough to waste anywhere near as much time. Cells don't even come close to doing that.
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:3, Insightful)
Things a pager doesn't solve... (Score:4, Insightful)
You could do that just as easily by not giving your work phone cell phone number to friends.
Oh, btw... (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anyone stop to ask the cell phone haters if they had such devices "back in their days"?
It's ok to be adverse to cell phones, it's ok to long for the pager days, but the pager functionality is *completely integrated* in the cell phone system, so are they asking that we "burn them all", or are they really whining about not being able to transition?
My phone has a silent mode. It has the option to disconnect an incoming call. It has the option to tell my service provider to never, ever, forward a call to voicemail *whatsoever*!
If I'm busy, I can pretty much tell from the preview of the text message alone, whether I need to read and see if something needs my attention, and if not, the combination of that and caller ID provides even more clue...
But sure, if you want, you can always try to cram a cell phone size display into the strangely crippled device that a pager is, and see if you can market it. If no one has done it before, I don't know, but I wouldn't invest in anything of the sort...
Bottom line: If you need the limitations of a pager, your phone *and you* in combination are up to the task easily, but instead, you can just whine as me in this comment, and then go blaming someone else for your failure to RTFM...
Re:The 80s called (Score:3, Insightful)
Please don't ever, ever do this. What will most likely happen is that one of your children will be playing with your phone and will press the OMG BIG RED BUTTON and set off the script.
If you're actually wealthy enough to have a serious risk of being kidnapped, hire your own private security firm and have the emergency message go to them. Hell, if you're actually wealthy enough to have a serious risk of being kidnapped, hire a real security guard to protect you.
In any case, that's a very cool script.
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had SMS messages that were over a week late
And the unacceptable part is that you still had to pay 30 cents for it.
Re:Skytel (Score:2, Insightful)
So the real issue is that he thinks the blackberry "is quiet and has a pathetic vibrate mode".
His (oddRaisin's) solution is to abandon the blackberry and get a pager. mark*workfire has proposed an alternate solution that will probably solve oddRaisin's issue without changing/adding hardware - why are you complaining?
It's a better solution then just throwing hardware at the problem. I've had a blackberry and understand both the original issue and mark*workfire solution - it's (probably) the best given the limited info that oddRaisin provided (did he try anything, including RTFM to see how to setup different volumes based on the time/situaation?)