By Marty Jerome, Globe Staff, 02/11/99
It could have been a scene from the movie ''L.A. Story,'' which starred Steve Martin: dozens of people mill around a cocktail reception, the last event at a dull Internet merchant's conference. Suddenly - inexplicably - various body parts of individuals in the crowd begin to ring, vibrate, and beep.
The event was real and the commotion came from cellular phones and pagers stashed in pockets and purses. The sudden symphony these gadgets caused coincided with the closing bell of the stock market that day. eBay, an Internet auction site, had just gone public. Business partners and stock brokers were making frenzied calls and pages to various people at the reception to report the stock's gravity-defying price.
Hardly anyone noticed the fuss. So ubiquitous are pagers and cell phones these days, no one even blinks at the distraction they cause, during worship services, midkiss on a deserted beach, when you're asking for a raise. Wireless technology is now a way of life.
But which wireless technology?
Technologies are competing with each other to become the single gadget that meets your every need for communications. Handheld computers now come with modems that let you surf the Web. Many notebooks now double as telephones and answering machines. Some cellular phones have adopted processors and built-in applications that let you manage your calendar and store names and addresses.
Even the lowly pager - the cheapest, simplest and most portable of these devices - is moving up town. Smart pagers, as they're called, now manage a host of chores that would have required a computer, a phone or both only three years ago. They're making an end run on these other devices by offering the most convenient form of communication around: e-mail in your pocket.
Pagers of yore (and many cheap models still in existence) would simply flash the phone number of someone trying to reach you. On being paged, you were expected to hunt down a telephone, and return the call. In essence, you were a servant to your beeper - and to anyone who beeped you.
Today, alphanumeric pagers can actually display text. You can receive the message without the intermediary of a phone. And unlike a cellular phone, in which you are trapped into conversation the minute you say hello, you can answer a page at your convenience, judging the urgency of the request from the message itself.
Add to alphanumeric capability two-way paging, which lets you beam back an answer from your humble pager. Suddenly you can leave your expensive, phone at the office: no roaming fees, no dropped calls, no missed messages because the phone is turned off, no static, no persistent ringing at embarrassing times. And pager batteries last for weeks, not hours.
Granted, messages must be short. Smart pagers typically provide space for only two to nine very short lines of text. You won't conclude multimillion-dollar deals or solve world hunger from a beeper. You can't add graphics to your messages or attach spreadsheets. On the other hand, tight space forces blabbermouths to get to the point.
With two-way paging, your device also communicates with the paging service, letting it know that a message was received or that you've entered a new geographical area. Better paging services now provide guaranteed message delivery and store-and-forward e-mail. A few let callers send a message to you from the service's Web site. And at least one sends not only text messages, but voice mail. Meanwhile, a host of third-party services are getting in on the action by offering to page you stock quotes, sports scores, or news updates.
Smart pagers come in a menagerie of sizes and designs. But, as with wireless phones, the device is secondary to selecting a service. You'll ultimately spend more on monthly charges than on the gadget itself. When shopping for a service, pricing will be your chief criteria, but you'll also want to inquire about which services your provider offers. Toll-free numbers and Internet functions are excellent, but watch out for hidden costs. At least you can take comfort that pricing structures for pagers aren't nearly as Byzantine as those for wireless phones.
Alphanumeric pagers start as low as $50. To get a two-way alphanumeric pager, you should plan to pony up anywhere from $80 to $400. Higher costs do not necessarily buy you greater capability. They typically reflect the cost and coverage of the service with which they work.
Where design is concerned, two-way pagers are bigger than simple alphanumeric models. Smart pagers come in essentially two flavors: those with keyboards and those without. A keyboard obviously lets you hack out any message you please, but given the Lilliputian size of a pager, touch typing is out of the question unless you're a Beanie Baby. Hunting and pecking at keys with a pencil eraser is mighty slow going.
Motorola's PageWriter 2000 is probably the best of the breed where keyboards are concerned. It opens like a tiny notebook PC. There's a big (relatively speaking) nine-line display on one half with a keyboard on the other. The device comes with an electronic phone book for pager numbers you routinely beep, and you can store incoming messages. Your missives not only reach other pagers, but they can go to Internet addresses - even fax machines. And, the PageWriter comes with rechargeable batteries (and a battery guage).
Less ambitious but shrewdly designed is SkyTel's AccessLink. It gives you four lines of display (20 characters per line), but it lacks a full keyboard, so your messages may tend to be a little cryptic. It's smaller than the Motorola and it weighs less. Navigating through saved messages, sports scores, and other information is one-button easy.
Sony's petite MP-7000 Alpha is also small - and handsome. It lacks a keyboard, but there is a small library of canned messages: ''Will call you later,'' ''Received your page,'' ''OK'' and so forth. You scroll through these by turning a large knob. Admittedly, it's a greeting-card form of communication, but the selection of messages is large enough to cover most bases.
If you simply can't stand the idea of carrying a pager around, why not wear it? Seiko's MessageWatch is an ordinary digital wristwatch that comes with a two-way pager under its skin. Its only drawback is that with such a tiny face, messages must be extremely short. As with the Sony, you scroll through canned messages you want to send. And unlike most pagers, the Seiko transmits over FM frequencies, which means it's primed to receive stock quotes, weather reports, and other information.
Two-way alphanumeric paging isn't the only technology serving up new smarts for pagers. Last month, Pioneer and Kodak unveilled a screen technology called Organic EL. The crystals that make up the display contain their own light source, which allows them to illuminate hard-to-read screens without running down your batteries. According to company officials, they should begin appearing in pagers by year end.
Color isn't far behind. Device manufacturers are quick to point out that the tiny real estate of a pager's screen greatly limits the amount of information that can be put within eyeshot at any given time. Color, they'll remind you, is information. Thus it allows you to communicate more in a tiny space.
Within the year, you can also expect to see pen-based pagers, in which you actually scribble on the display using a stylus. This will be enormously useful for drawing maps, for example, or sending your signature to authorize something. 3Com's pen-based Pilot is overwhelmingly the best-selling handheld computer on the market today in large measure because of its stylus. Tom Thumb keyboards are simply too awkward for mortals to use.
Likewise, at least one pager manufacturer is toying with the notion of adding a keyboard jack to its device. The idea is that you would use the keyboard from your PC to create a library of your own canned messages, which would be stored inside the device. You could then change or delete them as you see fit.
Global Positioning Systems - devices that beam signals to a satellite, which in turn, beams back your exact location - have become a boon to cars. Thanks to slumping costs, they're showing up in other places as well. Casio has already embedded one inside a wrist watch.
Internet access will eventually find its way to pagers as well, but you'd be forgiven if you asked, ''Why?''Many handheld PCs already offer this capability. Thus far the buying public has been less than enthusiastic about it. Viewing Web pages on screens so small will make you seasick.
