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?"

Comments

Oh, btw...

[Fjodor42]

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...