I don't know how my parents managed to put up with me when I was younger without strangling me in my sleep. It must have made them crazy to know they had a basically bright kid who brought home an endless succession of report cards saying how he had failed to live up to his potential. I have a deeper understanding of this now that I've been using the Synapse pager card for PalmPilot and see how much better it could've been with just a bit more effort.

Let me digress for a second to dwell on the much-hyped concept of convergence. The idea behind convergence is that "dumb" appliances will gain new abilities once they've gotten the proper dose of high-technology. A television, for example, could track your viewing habits and communicate with your cable box and VCR to tape your favorite shows without intervention, or alert you to changes in the broadcast schedule.

It's not just a concept, either. There are a number of chimeric devices with previously unavailable combinations of capabilities. WebTV marries the cable box to the Internet. There's a watch that acts as an emergency beacon, cell phones that double as pagers and answering machines and a number of devices that have printer/copier/fax/printer capabilities.

PageMart has leapt into the convergence fray with the Synapse pager card, which gives early-model PalmPilots pager capabilities and a brain transplant. The card, which replaces your Pilot's original memory card, provides 2MB of RAM and upgrades the Pilot's operating system to PalmOS 3.0. The pager capabilities are via Motorola's FLEX system, which helps prevent garbled and/or missed messages.

If you're in the market for a pager, you could easily do worse than the Synapse pager card. The relatively large screen of the Pilot -- much larger than any other pager screen -- means you can see entire messages without scrolling or squinting, and individual messages can be up to 300 characters in length. The messages can be filed away in different user-defined categories, copied and pasted into other Pilot applications or transferred to a computer like most everything else on a Pilot. When a numeric message is received, the Synapse card automatically checks it against the contact information stored on your Pilot and displays the relevant information along with the number.

Messages can be sent via email, the PageMart website, a downloadable application, directly via modem, operator dispatch, or desktop messaging hardware. Personal messages are numbered sequentially, so the Synapse card knows if it's missed a message. Messages can be deleted manually or after a specified amount of time, and you can choose to be alerted using the Pilot's screen and an audible alert, only the screen, or turn off notification altogether. If you leave your paging zone and enter another one, a phone call transparently changes your zone to match your new location.

When you look over the specs of the Synapse, it's a pretty impressive feature set. Only a handful of pagers are in the same league. So what's not to like?

To start with, there are a couple of basic functions missing. One of these is silent notification. Most pagers do this by vibrating, an option that would eat batteries and require a vibrator unit the size of a regular pager for something as large as the Pilot. For silent notification you have to be looking at the Pilot's screen when a page arrives. Another missing feature is an audible-only alert. Why can't I hear the alert unless the screen also activates? That doesn't make sense and it runs the batteries down unnecessarily. The worst part is that the screen activation time can't be set separately from the Pilot's auto-off feature, so that incoming pages will activate the screen for at least a minute unless you turn off the alerts completely. So you can either waste battery power or give up being notified of incoming messages. I went from fresh batteries to about 1/3 capacity in less than a week, and my Pilot's batteries normally last for months.

There are some other features that could have made the Synapse card invaluable. What about automatic message routing and different alerts based on the message content, header information or sender's identity? I'd like to know immediately if my boss calls, but I can wait until later to call a friend back. I'd like to be able to get longer messages. Much of the time I used the Synapse card, I ached for two-way paging. I wanted to be able to respond to the email I got, and I want my Pilot to *automatically* inform the paging network that it's in a different paging zone. The Synapse card lacks the built-in infrared port that comes with the PalmPilot 2MB upgrade card, an addition that can be useful for exchanging information with other Pilot owners. An infrared port can also do neat things like act as a remote control, use infrared-equipped printers without extra hardware and even hotwire certain European cars. Not that I'd do any of that, but I'd like the option to be available. These requests might seem unreasonable if they hadn't already been built into another pager, Motorola's PageWriter 2000.

If you already have a Pilot and don't have a pager, the Synapse card will be a dramatic improvement. On the other hand, if you already have or want a two-way pager, it's definitely not for you. If you're hoping to be able to do cool stuff like set different alarms for different messages and route messages based on topic, priority or sender, you'll be disappointed. PageMart's Synapse pager card for PalmPilot is a great addition to the Pilot, a good deal as an upgrade (since it includes a 2MB RAM upgrade and the new PalmOS), but falls short of what it *could* have been -- it could've been the best damn pager around.

- Andrew Sasaki [12/18/98]

Other pagers reviewed on Street Tech:

• PageWriter 2000 [8/3/98, Rated: 4.0]
• Beepwear Watch [2/9/98, Rated: 4.0]
• Email Pager [7/4/97, Rated: 2.5]