Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Look out - they're right behind you!
I can't stand cell phones, I only got one out of extreme necessity (and because my work stopped using pagers). I like to concentrate - I hate how cell phones immediately "demand" to be picked up. 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.
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?!
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Why, the same place all the slide rules went, of course.
--Q
Check with your local Hospital geek. Doctors, nurses, social workers, pretty much everyone in a hospital still has one. They are starting to introduce a "cellular phone" into hospitals known by the local docs as a "banana phone" due to its yellow color that indicates its a special super-duper-won't-interfere-with-life-support-machines-phone as opposed to the iKill. But only the most important doctors have them right now, due to the advanced complexity of their magic.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
He wants his manifesto back.
Read Pynchon.
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!
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.
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.
moox. for a new generation.
I have an old defunct pager that still lights up when pressed. I keep it on my belt when I want people to think how important I am. Sometimes I'll bump the button so it lights up and I can then say: "They really need me, sorry but I have to go."
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/
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
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.
It's all about the information. And what we do with it.
in case I catch the stupid
Too late.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
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.
None of them charge you to listen to your voice mail
http://sameritech.wordpress.com/2007/03/26/cell-phone-voicemail-dont-be-tricked-into-using-your-anytime-minutes/
I mentioned your problem to my wife.
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.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
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.
Great, now I have this song going through my head: "Where have all the pagers gone? Long time passing. Where have all the pagers gone? Long time ago..."
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.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
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.
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.
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
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.
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...
"The number you have dialed is imaginary. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again."
We use the Motorola Advisor Gold. They are wonderful devices - never break (I've known employees who have dropped them in the toilet and they still functioned afterwards), have a clear screen, good backlite, strong vibrate, and continue to vibrate if you do not acknowledge them. Great little tool for knowing when the assembly line is down.
http://www.americanmessaging.net/paging/index.asp
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.