Home

Features

Departments

News & Trends



 

Technology Update

Edited by Michael Colvard, MD and Steven Charles, MD

E-mail to Go

For between $200 and $500, you can never be without an e-mail connection.

Walter Bethke,
Senior Editor

Though e-mail grows more popular by the day, the machinations involved in getting messages when you’re away from your computer don’t. The equipment usually consists of a bulky laptop that needs to be connected to a phone jack in order for the e-mail system to work. Now, however, companies have paging networks that allow you to use devices as small as a pack of cigarettes to send and receive e-mail when you’re out of the office.

They’re called two-way pagers, and they basically allow you to receive, create and send e-mail messages. Here’s the lowdown on the latest products.

Glenayre’s AccessLink II
The AccessLink II is one of the smallest two-way pagers on the market, about the size of a normal one-way pager. Jim Kelly, Glenayre’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer, says the unit’s small size is a boon to users. “You can operate it with one hand,” he says. The user constructs messages with a “virtual keyboard,” which can display four lines of text at a time, all backlit for easier reading. To speed things up, and to accommodate situations in which users find themselves sending almost the exact same message to different people, there are also “canned” messages with pre-made text, which the user can create or modify. The AccessLink II also has an address book in which the user can store contacts.

One of the unique aspects of its two-way paging to which Glenayre calls attention is the technology that powers the messaging, called ReFlex. Since physicians often find themselves in hospitals, they may find it difficult for messages to penetrate the structure, due to both the building itself and the ray-shielding in parts of the hospital, such as a radiology department. However, Mr. Kelly says ReFlex was specifically designed to make it easier to get messages into such hard-to-reach places. Rather than using one communications base station in your area to send you a message, ReFlex sends the signal from many stations, increasing the probability that one of them will reach you. The ReFlex system will also give you a positive acknowledgement when a message is sent successfully, and a negative one if there was a problem. You can re-ceive a maximum of 10,000 characters per message, and can send up to 2,000, depending on the service plan. Its battery lasts for just over 30 days.

The AccessLink II also has an infrared data port that it can use to link to other infrared devices or to desktop PCs. This allows users to update their address book by linking their pager to their PC.

AccessLink II works with any e-mail system that allows you to forward your messages from your PC to another place. This includes Microsoft Outlook, but not America Online, which uses a proprietary e-mail system. The AccessLink sells for between $220 and $290, and is usually bundled in with a service plan from such providers as Skytel (www.skytel.com) and WebLink Wireless (store.yahoo.com/weblinkwirelessbusiness/). Service plans range from $9.95 per month to $29.95 per month.

The Motorola Talkabout 900 and PageWriter 2000X
The Talkabout 900 (T900) is the latest two-way pager to hit the market, and is aimed squarely at active young people, as well as those who are simply interested in basic, remote two-way messaging.

The T900 is about the same size as the AccessLink II but opens up, clamshell style, to reveal a backlit screen and a backlit keyboard that allows you to type in messages. It also has extra memory to store contacts, as well as boilerplate messages. It features guaranteed message delivery, which means, if your T900 is off and someone sends you a message, you’re guaranteed to receive it when the pager is reactivated. Though primarily a messaging device, some service plans also allow the T900 to receive custom Internet news alerts, so you can follow the headlines that interest you. This isn’t available in all areas, though.
 

The Motorola Talkabout 900 (left) and PageWriter 2000X allow you to send and receive e-mail remotely.


One of the most distinctive features of the T900 is its price. While many two-way pagers cost $225 or more, it costs under $200.

The T900’s big brother is the PageWriter 2000X. While the T900 is a basic communication device, the 2000X has its own operating system, which allows users to add software and perform what’s known as “Web querying,” in which they acquire tidbits of information from the Internet, such as driving directions, restaurant reviews and news flashes. The 2000X also allows PC synchronization, a procedure with which users of Palm computers are familiar. Placing the 2000X in a “cradle” connected to your PC allows the devices to match their contacts and to-do lists.

The PageWriter 2000X will cost from $335 to $450, depending on the service provider you choose and the plan on which it operates. Plans that carry the T900 and the 2000X include Skytel, WebLink Wireless and PageNet (www.pagenet.com).

Coming this year is the TimePort 935, a two-way pager with the functions of a Palm computer. The company says the TimePort allows users to beam business cards to other personal digital assistants (PDAs) or even beam documents to printers to get hard copies.

Research in Motion’s (RIM) Blackberry Series.
RIM offers two devices, the Blackberry 950 and the 957. The former is pager-sized with a small, backlit screen and less memory for storing messages and tasks, while the latter is palm-sized, with a larger screen and more than twice the memory of the 950. Both use software to allow secure messaging, synchronization with your desktop PC and a docking cradle.

One of RIM’s helpful features is called “address resolution.” This is useful for sending an e-mail to a non-Internet address. For example, if you send a message to “IT Department,” then hit “Check Name” on the device, it will automatically check all your address books for it. It uses any match it finds. As for message management, Black-berry uses a “more” function. When a long message arrives in the inbox, only the first 2K of it initially goes to your Blackberry. If you want to read on, you hit the “more” button, and the software will send the next 2K piece. This lets you judge the worth of a long message before it clogs up your memory banks.

The Blackberry works with either Microsoft Outlook-based e-mail systems or Internet e-mail systems (offered through Internet service providers). The smaller 950 costs $349 for a version with 2 Mb of memory and $399 for one with 4 Mb. The larger 957 has 5 Mb of memory and costs $499. National coverage service plans start at $39.99, and you can learn more about the hardware and the plans at www.blackberry.net. 

Return to Features page