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Back in early days of steam-powered telecom, people had simple pagers. They'd beep when you had a message, and you had to call the pager service to retrieve it. Most of the changes pagers have gone through since have involved refinements in the type of message and its delivery: pagers have become alphanumeric, some can deliver brief audio messages, most have some type of memory. Some services offer national, and even international, coverage. For the most part, pagers all work the same way. Transmitters broadcast a message with information meant for your specific pager; the signal blankets the area, but all the other pagers except yours ignore it. Your pager knows to look at the message because of a unique ID code, and that ID code is broadcast as part of the message. Think of someone yelling your name across a crowded room to get your attention. If your pager is turned off, or out of range, the message is lost, vanished into the ether like old Honeymooners episodes. Obviously, this system has its drawbacks. If you're using a nationwide service, messages bound for your pager are transmitted all over the country, wasting bandwidth. Longer text or audio messages waste LOTS of bandwidth, and transmitters can become overwhelmed during peak load times. Another drawback is that you can miss messages, defeating the purpose of carrying a pager in the first place.
The solution is two-way pagers, devices that can both receive and send information. Turn the pager on and it sends out a signal saying, in essence, "Here I am." No more transmitters in New York sending messages while you're in L.A. Instead of a pager that passively receives a signal like some cheap radio, a two-way pager sends a signal back to the transmitter saying, "I got it." If the transmitter doesn't get that message, it can re-broadcast later until the pager responds. No more lost messages. So why isn't everyone using two-way pagers? Cost. It's expensive for pager services to upgrade their networks to send AND receive messages, and the necessity of including a transmitter makes the individual pagers cost more. Despite this, market, technological, and competitive pressures mean that most pager services will eventually take a trip down the two-way road. Motorola's PageWriter 2000 is the Cadillac of two-way pagers. It has a large backlit grayscale screen capable of displaying nine 27-character lines at a time, 1.25MB RAM, a 47-key QWERTY keyboard and its own GUI operating system. Like a Cadillac, it's not tiny; it's the size of a thick deck of cards, and weighs in at 6.7 ounces (including the rechargable battery). That's not enough to develop any new muscles, but it feels fairly heavy hanging on your belt. The flip lid allows message viewing while the pager is still on the belt clip, a particularly handy feature. The PageWriter 2000 (which, in the interests of brevity, I'll abbreviate to "PW2K") has several other nifty features. Its easy-to-use operating system can be upgraded and new applications and functionality can be added to its flash memory. The screen is gigantic for a pager, and I'm constantly impressed with the amount of text it can display. There's a built-in infrared communications port on the pager and the charger, which I've never used, but I imagine could eventually come in handy. The deluxe charger can be connected to a PC, and addresses from the pager's built-in address book can be synched with the computer's desktop address book. The PW2K can be used to send Email, faxes and messages to other pagers. Local, regional and national messaging options are available. The PW2K's FLEX user interface is fairly well-designed, and I've been able to use all the functions I needed without ever having to consult the user manual. I've never been stymied by the interface, a good sign for someone as interface-obsessed as I am. Most of the pager's functions are customizable. There are several different alert sounds, each of which can be assigned to different message types; a message from a friend can be assigned a different sound than an urgent email (did I mention that the PW2K can receive Email?) from your boss. Messages can be automatically routed to custom folders and deleted after a specified time limit or number of messages is reached. The font size can be changed. There's even a PIM (Personal Information Manager, geek-speak for "organizer") program you can buy for the PW2K, although I can't imagine using the tiny keys to enter much info. All these bells and whistles make the PW2K one of the most expensive pagers available, even before the monthly service charges are tacked on. The service fees start at $25 for 600 10-character message blocks and go up to $50 for 2000 10-character message blocks, plus a $0.10 fee for every 10 characters over the monthly allotment. 20,000 characters sounds like a lot, but it gets used up at an alarming rate once you become accustomed to receiving useful-sized messages. You'd have to be as rich as Bill Gates to get Email this way. Naturally, sending messages, faxes or Email involves extra fees. There are a few drawbacks to the PW2K; it's large and heavy, the keys are small, the batteries last less than a week (and sometimes only a few days) between charges. On the plus side, it offers a number of features unavailable on other pagers. The only thing I can think of that comes close is the one-way Synapse Pager Card, which makes a PalmPilot into a high-powered pager. If you really *need* two-way messaging, Motorola's PageWriter 2000 is the best tool in town. The ultimate test of a product lies in its usefulness. In a relatively short time, the PW2K became a useful part of my utility belt, alongside my PalmPilot, Space Pen and Leatherman PST II. (Note to readers: this is just a metaphor; to actually wear all this on a belt would be crossing into some forbidden zone of deepest, darkest Geekdom.) From now on, I will only visit the world of steam-powered one-way pagers as a tourist. Motorola's PageWriter 2000 has endowed me with powers and abilities beyond those of mere mortals. P.S. - Messaging service is available at www.skytel.com - Andrew Sasaki [8/3/98] Other pagers reviewed on Street Tech:
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