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Where Have All the Pagers Gone?
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?"
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
There are still pager providers. I have a pager from Skytel for work. http://www.skytel.com/wireless_paging_devices.html I've got a Titan 3 pager. It has a heinous alert tone that would be nearly impossible to sleep through.
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).
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.
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.
..........FULL STOP.
We might have the same system in Europe soon. So if you are from the EU, don't gloat too much.
http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/1213633044.87
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
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.