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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?"

3 of 584 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Come on... by Detritus · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Two obvious defects of cell phones are size and battery life. I have to recharge my cell phone every few days. When I had a pager, it would run for weeks on a single disposable battery that could be obtained almost anywhere. It also had a refreshingly simple user interface. The device was heavily optimized for one function, and it did that cheaply and effectively.

    --
    Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
  2. Re:Try YouMail... by hab136 · · Score: 0, Redundant

    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.

    Most carriers have free calls to voicemail and customer service.

  3. Re:The 80s called by LazyBoot · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I would think he means iPod Touch