Where Have All the Pagers Gone? 584
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?"
Where have all the pagers gone? (Score:5, Funny)
Look out - they're right behind you!
Skytel (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Skytel (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Skytel (Score:4, Informative)
You must have missed the part where the OP said that they were already using their Blackberry as a pager, but were ditching it because it "is quiet and has a pathetic vibrate mode".
He's complaining that the volume isn't loud enough, and that the vibration isn't sufficient.
Motorola (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Motorola (Score:5, Funny)
I've known employees who have dropped them in the toilet and they still functioned afterwards
Oh well. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again!
Re:Motorola (Score:5, Funny)
There is no escaping from field service, from New Jersey, or from Motorola pagers.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Try American Messaging (Score:4, Funny)
http://www.americanmessaging.net/paging/index.asp [americanmessaging.net]
I believe verizon sold/spun off their paging service to American Messaging. We use still use pagers for notifications.
On the plus side, not only are they reliable, but my pager gives me some serious street cred, Every thinks I'm a drug dealer, or still living in 8th grade.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Rogers in Canada still does paging too.
http://your.rogers.com/store/wireless/products/pagers/business/overview.asp [rogers.com]
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
We use http://www.usamobility.com/ [usamobility.com]
It works. It's cheaper by far than offering all your employees cell phones, particularly if you intend on forcing them to wear the leash.
Doctors still use pagers too, they are just more reliable in the sense that you will almost certainly get the page unless you are intentionally trying to hide from civilization.
Cell phones are great if you want to talk to people, but if you just want to know people want to talk to you ... pagers are still better.
Re:Where have all the pagers gone? (Score:5, Funny)
The eighties wanted them back.
Re:Where have all the pagers gone? (Score:5, Funny)
The eighties wanted them back.
They want their joke back too.
I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:5, Interesting)
With a pager, someone notified me of their desire to speak to me, I wrap up whatever I'm doing, and I call them. If it's really urgent, they put a 911 at the end and I move a little quicker. I really do miss them... I can't be the only one... right... right?!
Ted Kaczynski paged (Score:5, Funny)
He wants his manifesto back.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
With a pager, someone notified me of their desire to speak to me, I wrap up whatever I'm doing, and I call them. If it's really urgent, they put a 911 at the end and I move a little quicker. I really do miss them... I can't be the only one... right... right?!
Have you heard of SMS, or "texting"? :P
It can work exactly the same as paging, and is what we use at work for the same purpose.
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes... Problem with Texting is that you have no control over delivery times. A Pager message is guaranteed to be delivered within 5 minutes (at least, here in Holland). SMS and other texting options don't have that guarantee. We tried using sms for relaying snmp alerts outside business hours. It sometimes took 2 hours for us to be notified that a servers was down. So we took the pager back in service.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've had SMS messages that were over a week late. This, of course, is the fault of the cellphone carriers not acknowledging the way SMS is now used by upgrading the service to reflect its customers' expectations.
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:5, Informative)
Moreover, SMS messages are often *never* delivered; making SMS messaging impossible for use in an environment where the message MUST be delivered.
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, that's the other part. Unlike e-mail, you don't even get notified weeks later that it never made it. The funny thing is that it usually costs more money to send a text message than email. They really do need to redesign the SMS protocol to take into account both priority and receipts.
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:4, Informative)
Many phones give you the ability to request to be notified when the SMS is delivered. I believe this is end to end delivery, not just to the SMSC. Of course, this feature may not work across networks.
Re: (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: (Score:3, Informative)
Try YouMail... (Score:2, Troll)
Youmail has made voicemail and my cell phone a lot more livable. It takes over for the voicemail functions of your provider and records the incoming message. It optionally sends you a text message with the details of the call (phone number, duration, message left or not) and optionally texts or emails you a transcr
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:5, Interesting)
My voicemail goes something like this:
Voicemail is just a gimmick to get you to use more minutes than you really should, at no expense to the carrier since they don't actually have to connect the call to anyone. It's 100% profit.
Re: (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.
Re: (Score:2)
What carriers don't charge you to listen to your voicemail? Also when do you physically turn off your personal phone for more than 24 hours? T mobile delivers my text messages as long as I'm in service range in 24 hours.
the only time I've been out of cell phone range for more than 6 hours was during an offshore sailboat race where we were 8 miles off the coast at one point. Once we were within 4 mile reception kicked back in no problem. The phone is always on and barring that everyone knows my email is myna
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:4, Informative)
http://sameritech.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/cell-phone-voicemail-dont-be-tricked-into-using-your-anytime-minutes/ [wordpress.com]
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:5, Interesting)
Many do. Maybe not in the US (could be, you seem to know), but in many other countries where there is no such thing as "IN" calls, you just pay the call.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:5, Funny)
Wait... do you PAY to RECEIVE text messages? Soon you'll tell us you charge for incoming calls as well. Oh... you live in the US. I'm truly sorry.
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1213633044.87 [eubusiness.com]
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:4, Interesting)
If you send them frequently, you should consider an unlimited plan. I pay $30/month for unlimited messaging with an AT&T family plan. This includes text, mms, and IM (we don't really do much besides text) Here's how my messaging broke down last month:
My wife - 389
My 17yo - 1958
My 15yo - 11039
My 10yo - 40
Me - 163
13,589 text messages for $30. Less than 1/4 of a cent per message. I'm sure some of those were counted twice, but at that price, I don't really care. That isn't even the highest I've seen. The 15yo has had over 20000 by herself in one month.
Layne
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:4, Interesting)
1 Month (30 * 24 * 60) = 43200 minutes.
20,000 text averages out to 1 text every 2.16 minutes.
If you take away eight hours out of the day for sleep/activities where they could not text then it translates into 1 text every minute and 26 seconds!
They wonder why kids now have such short attention spans, I'm guessing that it might have to do with the fact that they have to stop what they are doing (on average) every minute or so to send a text. Anyway, I'm sure we all as kids did something that previous generations though was absurd, so I'm not criticizing. I just think its interesting to see what "those crazy kids" do, and it makes you wonder what will be the next latest and greatest thing...
FWIW I'm 26 and hate to text. I do however use them occasionally, but I still prefer to call or email.
Re:Try YouMail... (Score:4, Funny)
Then again, those prices were in euro and not dollars for a reason.
Re: (Score:3)
Eh ? You pay to receive text messages ? What kind of network is that, do you have to pay to send them as well ?
Re: (Score:2)
You do realize that checking voice mail is entirely voluntary, don't you? As is answering the phone. In fact powering the phone is also voluntary. Just like a land line, except it has many more features that are are your disposal. (Not the other way around.)
Or do you just like making things more difficult than they need to be because it gets you attention?
Re: (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
Obvious solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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
No, it's not. You're on a mobile phone. You can always start asking "Hello? Hello? Is there anybody? HELLO!" two or three seconds after picking up the call and then hang up. If they call again, do the same thing. How are they to prove that you weren't in an area with bad reception?
Re: (Score:2)
No, I'm right there with you. There are paging plans, google for pagers, but they are the same cost as cell plans, pretty absurd.
SMS could fill that niche, but with providers raping folks on charges it's not really there as yet, e.g. you don't want to send a text to someone as you might be costing them a dime or more.
Maybe what cellphones need is a pager mode? They might in some sort of "do not disturb" mode, then users immediately go to the leave or message or send a page note?
I miss my pager all the time. (Score:5, Interesting)
A cell phone is basically a consumer device. A pager was fundamentally a business device. The differences were legion. What I miss most is having a service where the clients were given the number of a human-staffed service and those operators then keyed in the message. Clients were also told that vague messages would get slower responses than specific ones. If they wanted my attention at 9:00 p.m. on a busy night then a "call us" message would leave then sh*t out of luck. They wanted attention, they had to manage to describe coherently and specifically why they needed my attention to an operator who knew neither of us and knew less about computers than the average modern grandma.
"I need him" ."
"Is that what I should write, sir?"
"Um, uh, um, no. Say, um, that, um, it's important."
"So I should say 'call, it's important?'"
"Um, no, um . .
It took only a few iterations to train clients to articulate the issue *before* hitting my number on speeddial.
"The archive server is down."
"Stories sent to blues are getting bounced."
Anybody who has done consulting will understand that this completely changed the dynamic. Among other things, this requirement to specify the problem got rid of a huge percent of the normal degree of blame game b.s. afterwards. It also taught clients that they had to reign in their panic if they wanted me to call. And sometimes by forcing them to define the problem, that act alone got them to fix the frackin' problem themselves and not waste my time at all. When I *did* get a page I could take a few minutes and think through the message and gather my thoughts about my response before having to be on the phone with them.
I'm not a consultant anymore but, gawd, if I were, I just don't know how I would do it without that glorious gatekeeper, the pager.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If only you could pay someone for answering your phone - a professional service, perhaps.
Re:I miss my pager all the time. (Score:5, Interesting)
Truth is, I've been planning to get one of those Voyager-type phones with the less tiny QWERTY keyboard sometime in about a month. Or maybe a Nokia N810. Or iPhone. Last month I bought an HP 2133. Add to that my internet phone and I'm *hoping* that some time this spring I'll be able to build some interlocking system using all three that manages to do an almost passable job of providing the kind of gatekeeper and message pre-sorter functions that I took for granted long about '95.
One of my oldest friends and I periodically argue about this kind of thing and I've long been saying that we're going to see the return of the human secretary. My friend used to argue fiercely for technological fixes like agents and groupware but as the years pass he's coming around.
Personally I think that much of what we're talking about here is about judgement. And in a world of accelerating change, there will always be a lag for entrepreneurs in trying to make any expert system understand the nuances that a typical fifties secretary could handle just fine before her coffee with half of her attention. Some of this will probably be outsourced to people in places like India but I'm betting that groups like physically disabled workers or those looking for telecommuting options right here in the developed world will work out just fine for most of us who really need it.
Frankly, I don't know about y'all but I'm trying out a new assistant on Wednesday. I've been a geek for going on thirty years and afaic some jobs are just not best addressed with technology.
Re: (Score:2)
Not to be a horn tooter here, but one of my favorite features about the iPhone is the ability to visually see who a voicemail is from, and the fact that you don't have to listen-to and navigate an audible menu.
I don't know of any phones at this time other than the iPhone that offer VVM, but I sure hope it takes off.
Re: (Score:2)
It sounds like you can't stand phones. Nothing you say applies only to cell phones.
If you want to concentrate, just switch the phone to a profile that doesn't react to calls, but gives you a beep when a text message comes in. Voila, you have a pager.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:4, Funny)
loved my pager watch
I could look down, even from a podium, and read a message while continuing whatever
service was supposedly complimentary for a year but never seemed to shut off
but then my dog bit into it
Re: (Score:2)
I hear that some guy got together with some friends and made some company called Danger, Inc, or something to try to partially address that. Afaic, they did a damn good job and I'm glad that they're out there. And afaic, they deserve some of the credit for the return of the "netbook", something that means a great deal to me.
Thanks.
Re:I've got to say, I agree with this post (Score:5, Informative)
If you don't pick up you've got to listen to some damn message - and you're sitting wondering about the content of the message until you listen to it.
I almost never pick up my cellphone anymore... I leave it on silent. My voicemail goes here [phonetag.com], and if I feel like it I can check the transcription email on my phone. No tedious sorting or listening because I can read ten times faster than people can talk.
The transcription service works extremely well, and is pretty cheap. Sorry to sound like an ad but I was in the EXACT position as you and I am much happier now.
Odd (Score:3, Interesting)
My phone has a silent mode and it doesn't go to an answering service if I don't pick it up, it just gets recorded as a missed call.
If you have a problem with cell phones it's because you let it control you rather than vice-versa.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Slide rules (Score:5, Funny)
Why, the same place all the slide rules went, of course.
--Q
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I still have a pair of my good slide rules. One I use, one I have saved for any grandchildren. They don't need batteries, and they're very handy for teaching engineers that the last few digits of their calculator produced numbers are often a bold-faced lie compared to the real world. But they have gotten tough to get.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
its a round somewheres
Hospitals. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I had not realized that I've never actually had to call someone's pager before until my wife went into labor at three in the morning and I had to call the ob-gyn. The pager rang once and then beep! Silence. I'm confused, rattled, sleep deprived; I leave a message (words that will never find human ears) and phone the hospital. Get the switchboard operator to track the guy down.
While my wife's in labor, the ob-gyn actually has the whatsit to pull me aside and spend a solid fifteen minutes showing me how t
Re: (Score:2)
Why don't you get a second cellphone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course since is
Re:Why don't you get a second cellphone? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Because this is slashdot, he should build a robot which can receive and parse incoming messages and wake him up if the message is important. The robot should be designed to make coffee and pancakes as well, why not? Building a robot shouldn't take long, and it'll be a lot cooler to have your own robot than some silly pager.
Build a robot to do it!
In reading this post very quicly,my brain accidentally parsed ... and hump him if the message is important.
Now *that* would be a really impressive Slashdot robot, much less one you could not ignore in the middle of the night.
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.
As a doctor... (Score:3, Funny)
Myself and some co-workers spent quite a while recently researching this; except for a few people in our group, we agreed that the best substitute for a pager was to have a large-breasted secretary in a nurse-like outfit mind our phones and repeatedly slap our face with their titties if we got a page - sort of like motorboating, but with them doing all the work.
Seen maybe 4 in the past few years. (Score:2)
Change (sms/text) ringtone? (Score:3, Insightful)
Mabybe you need to assign a different ring-tone to your work numbers ?
Things Gone By (Score:2, Funny)
But now it's time to turn the page.
-capt poetry
Custom Ringtones (Score:4, Informative)
Custom Ringtones are you friend here.
When I use to be on call I setup a ringtone for calls from the overnight answering service. Reveille was usually my choice as bugles blaring full blast usually woke me up from even my worst alcohol induced slumbers. With the Blackberry I know you can set these rules to override your sound profile. So you could set your profile to silent and avoid all other calls\txts but the custom rules would still come through.
Man I miss my BlackBerry....stupid WinMo pos smartphone, Oh well I'm not on call anymore :D so it isn't as bad.
From Google Sponsored Links (Score:3, Informative)
metrotelpaging.com
Along with a few dozen other companies dedicated to this service. It's one thing if finding the answer takes some serious searching, but this is just silly.
I carry one... (Score:5, Funny)
Not gone, just more niche (Score:5, Informative)
Pagers definitely have not gone, they just have become unpopular among consumers as two-way messaging replaced it. Hospitals and the US Government use one-way pagers still a lot. Our company was apparently taken over by another larger one, http://www.usamobility.com/ [usamobility.com]
Nokia 6310i? (Score:5, Informative)
My nokia 6310i has a "pager" mode, when you receive an SMS, it keeps beeping as loud as it can until you do something.
Very annoying, but can also be very useful.
Frank
Google is too hi tech too... (Score:3, Informative)
type pager into google and a whole bunch of services pop up...
Down the flush! (Score:2)
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.
Pagers are still around (Score:2)
Pager coverage is actually pretty damn good. Come to think about it, I had less issues with pager coverage than cell coverage even though it was obvious they broadcast pages cross a given region, a few states or cross the nation wide network. Service was pretty damned reasonable, about $8/month or so IIRC, about the same as unlimited texts on t-mobile.
Why did I ditch it? Well the pager networks got bought out by other people, changed hands, and they no longer offered some of the handy dandy services they
No problem - we can help (Score:5, Funny)
She graciously has offered to send you her pager. Just post your address in response to this post. We will even, as a public service, pay for shipping.
I can attest to the fact the unit is plenty loud. As a bonus, you will get plenty of pages for problems that an engineer should never be called for and should have been handled by customer support.
They are obsolete (Score:2)
Where have all the pagers gone... (Score:4, Funny)
Wrong number (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sometimes tempted to text back "Double dumbass on you" or something else inflammatory -- then sit back and watch the 6 o'clock news. But that would be evil.
Skytel (Score:2)
http://www.skytel.com/ [skytel.com]
Our pager team carries Skytel pagers because they have guaranteed delivery SLAs. We have tried SMS with all of the major providers over the years and they cannot reliably deliver messages in a reasonable amount of time. It's the best option short of having a NOC staffed 24/7/365.
Why would you carry another little brick? (Score:2)
Unless you completely reject a cellphone, deliberately reducing the functionality of the device you are carrying, why would you want to carry both a cell phone and a pager?
Simply because the cellphone's pager is not good enough? It always puzzled me, why would people carry more than one of pager and cellphone (much like why would anybody mix grep, sed, and awk in one command line, but I digress). My guess was, it had to do with the status, an attempt to derive importance from the number of gizmos carried.
USAMobility 2Way w/ Motorola T900 (Score:2)
We still use pagers for our notification systems. Most cell providers do not do guaranteed delivery/receipt of text messages while 2 way paging service will. It often has a much larger range than cell towers will give you and works further inside building that cell phones die in. Regardless of what many say here, pagers are not obsolete.
I personally have found the USAMobility [usamobility.com] people responsive enough, generally knowledgeable and the times the device has broken, they've had a new one to me in 24 hours.
Oth
Re: (Score:2)
Still around, just harder to find... (Score:2)
BT discontinued their pager network years ago; there do still seem to be companies about in the UK who provide them though (such as PageOne). I'm sure you can scare some up in the US as well - my guess is its become a niche market the larger players are no longer interested in.
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.
Some background (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not a pager guy, but have used them and know pager guys. Also, have played with old pager gear as a staring point for some ham radio projects.
Pagers used high power (300 watt) transmitters, and if you wanted to cover a decent area, several of them, synchronized to prevent distorted signals in the area where their coverage patterns overlapped. They were known for their tendency to interfere with other systems, no matter how well they were maintained. It was an expensive way to make not much money.
Profit margins were low, and churn was always a problem. Companies went in and out of business, larger companies consolidated the smaller companies, but, in the end, Nextel and cellular technology gave you two-way communication at essentially the same monthly rate.
Basically, paging companies were made economically obsolete by advances in technology.
There are "micro" paging systems still in use at restaurants, hospitals and companies, but the high power transmitters on the hill are pretty much gone, replaced with cell sites.
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: (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.
Re:The 80s called (Score:5, Informative)
The battery on a pager lasts for weeks. On some models, months. Pagers don't transmit, so they can be used in high sensitivity areas. They're very cheap to run.
Pagers are still popular - in places like Hospitals they're still mandatory as mobile phones are banned (still, although that's (slowly) changing).
Pagers are great (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much all doctors still use them. Why?
1) great reception - I often get pages way inside buildings, where cellphones have no hope of working
2) Less intrusive. I get the info, but can respond to it when I choose. I guess you could call screen, but don't always know when to do that.
3) batteries last for several months
4) Loud common ring tones, strong vibrate mode. Pagers tend to have common ring tones, which different phones do not.Easier to differentiate in a noisy setting if your pager is going off.
Sure they are an older tech, and not "cool", but they are still very useful, and better than a phone in many cases.
My hospital uses Unication text pagers - google it.
Re:Pagers are great (Score:4, Interesting)
The major hospital where I work is still tied to pagers. They have a well-developed and flexible infrastructure built around them: calling a pager directly, numeric paging, text paging, etc. We like our pagers so much that, when we heard Motorola was discontinuing the model we use, we bought up all the available stock and stashed it away.
That stash won't last forever, though, so the communications guys are testing out replacement technologies, like cellphones and VOIP. They have yet to find something that provides the same kind of flexibility and ubiquitous service.
Re:Pagers are great (Score:5, Informative)
Pretty much all doctors where I live still use them.
Fixed that for you. I haven't seen a pager here in ages.
You must not be in hospitals much. Every hospital I work in I see pagers in use. For most of the reasons stated by the original poster.
3) batteries last for several months
Cell phone batteries often last a couple years, considering I've never owned a cell phone that didn't come with a charger.
The fact he was making is that batteries in a pager don't run out as fast as cell phone. No need to replace the single battery (in most pagers) but once a month sometimes and no need to remember to put it on a charger every night.
4) Loud common ring tones, strong vibrate mode. Pagers tend to have common ring tones, which different phones do not. Easier to differentiate in a noisy setting if your pager is going off.
Fail. Almost every cell phone will allow you to install your own ring tone, but I've never had a pager with that ability.
Once again you assume too much. He was referring to more unique tones of the pager compared to the obnoxious ring tone choices on cell phones. The vibrate mode on most cell phones is very weak. At least weaker than they need to be in certain environments.
Re:Pagers are great (Score:5, Informative)
All of the major hospitals in this area still require doctors to have pagers.
Pagers can be used in info sensitive, and interference sensitive areas. I've never seen a no pager zone. Hospitals can't have phones because the interference (google GSM interference) problems with monitors, and with the HIPPA problems with people being able to photo sensitive info.
I'm not sure what he's talking about on call screening.
On batteries, he's saying a single AA battery will last months. No charging. My BBCurve will go a day or two without a charge. My old moto pager would eat a battery every 2 months.
Not sure the point on ringtones.
As far as reception, a pager needs MUCH less of a signal for it to receive it's itty bitty page. A cell phone needs to maintain a strong signal because it's required for a decent 2 way call.
I can see the point of a pager as a sysadmin. I've been suffering through with a blackberry as well, having monitors send SMS. The blackberry isn't loud (a pager in the house used to wake me up no matter WHERE I left it.) If I ever mute the phone because I went somewhere quite, I have to remember to turn it back on. I've missed SMS's because of ATT, never used to miss anything from the paging service. I've gotten pages when I was miles out in the Gulf of Mexico fishing, long after I lost cell reception.
Until the phone companies make true paging a feature (pages aren't subject to the settings of calls, SMS, apps, etc) they will not be the same.
Now, as far as why this is asked on slashdot? Google for pager service, tons of info. If that doesn't help find anyone local, then go to the nearest hospital, find a random doctor with a pager and ask them if they know who it's through. A lot of the time the pager is branded, or will at least have a sticker on it with the company it's from.
Re:Pagers are great (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
Because sometimes you need to be paged.
Also, sending a page from a modem is trivial, just dial the number, pause, and dial whatever number or code you want. I can even program the ancient phone system at work to do that when someone calls after hours. If you've got a way to do that for an arbitrary cell phone provider for free, I'd love to hear about it (otherwise, you
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OK
Re:The 80s called (Score:5, Informative)
Look out for Symbian phones. Most Nokia N or E-series phones have many different applications available that allow you to do all sorts of things with SMS. From spam filtering to conversation management and more.
I use a Nokia E90 and find that its probably the most powerful cellphone I have ever used. I have an iTouch and can't imagine trying to use it for anything beyond music/video and the occasional browsing. If the browser on my E90 isn't enough, I can use an application called Joiku Spot to share the HSDPA connection on the E90 with the iTouch via wifi, or just connect to a PC/Laptop via Bluetooth, USB or even InfraRed and use HSDPA that way.
The E-Series phones all offer a free application from Nokia called MfE (Mail for Exchange) that allows you to access Exchange 2000 through to 2007. There are other companies out there offering their own versions that offer even more feature than the basic MfE from Nokia.
There are Blackberry client for the Nokia E series phones so if you currently have push services from Blackberry, you can continue to use them on your Nokia. Probably the most significant difference would be the cameras. N-Series tend to have better cameras at higher resolutions (anywhere up to 8MP) where as the E-series average 3.2MP cameras.
Many of the phones have built in GPS and include Nokia Maps, but it also works equally well with Google Maps for Mobile. Right down to turn by turn route assistance using the GPS.
Symbian based cell phones have been around since 2001 when Nokia released the first 7650. The Symbian platform is a direct descendant of the old Psion devices. It is mature. It is stable. It has years of user feedback. It just works. There is a very large application base available for it out there.
Oh, and the best feature for me has been the version of Python Nokia released for their E and N-series phones along with an API that allows you to hook in to nearly every aspect of the phone, from the GPS, camera, OpenGL, through to pulling data from the calendar or the messaging platforms among others.
The most paranoid, yet strangely compelling, Python script I like is one that works as a kind of panic button. You load the app and it immediately takes a photo of whatever the camera is aimed at, sends a MMS message (or email, or SMS) with your current location from the cell tower while it waits till it has a GPS lock and includes that photo if possible. Once it has GPS lock, it will send GPS coords via SMS every X (edit the script to set, defaults to 180) seconds and then will also call a designated number to play back a pre-recorded message, then use text-to-speech to give the GPS coordinates on that call. It can then call emergency services and play that same message for them. If it can't get GPS lock (say you're in a building or whatever) then it will just use cell towers it can detect so that there is at least some method of tracing you.
All from a python script running on a cellphone. You can find it on the Nokia developer forums wiki. Because its a script, you can modify it to suit your needs and location if you want. Nokia's Python API is so straight forward that you can easily add features of your own.
You could probably even write a Python script to manage your SMS messages exactly as you want them to be dealt with if you know even a small amount of Python.
Good places to start are community sites like allaboutsymbian.com or my-symbian.com. Or you can check out the S60.com blogs and sites.
There are a lot of devices from Nokia now. E-series are targetted more at Enterprise users where as the N-series are more consumer market devices, but can still do everything an E-series device can do.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Pagers? I havn't seen those...er, ever (Score:5, Funny)
in case I catch the stupid
Too late.