CNNdotCOM Technofile: E-mail pagers

Motorola Talkabout T900

From staff reports

(CNN) -- Small enough to wear on your belt and savvy enough to transmit pages, e-mail and Web pages, e-mail pagers may become the addictive successor to cell phones for wireless users.

As the established leader in the arena, the Rim Blackberry pager offers the services of a typical e-mail program along with a few extras like a memo pad and calculator. Its 2 MB of on-board memory is enough to store a lot of old messages and to manage an appointment calendar, task list and contact list.

The 31-key keyboard literally requires you to be all-thumbs when typing, and with a trackwheel acting as a mouse, you can turn the wheel to scroll through text and click it to choose an option. The LCD holds six to eight lines of text, leaving sufficient room for extras like pager and Internet services. Powered by one AA battery, the Rim Blackberry runs three weeks without recharging under normal use.

	TECHNOFACTS
So what's the price tag on this?

The Talkabout T900 by Motorola is the newcomer to e-mail pagers and has a lot of the same features. It's not as bulky as the Rim, and you won't feel like (as much of) a geek wearing it, but its LCD display is smaller, with four lines and 80 characters of space. Other than a flip top that keeps the screen clean, and a choice of 13 alerts (including vibrator), it has a lot of the same features and e-mail capabilities as the Rim.

Sign up with a top-notch wireless ISP like GoAmerica, and you can use the Rim to send and receive e-mails from almost anywhere in the United States. That's an amazing improvement over the coverage you could get just a couple of years ago. GoAmerica strips out the graphics so the text can fit on the screen.

CNNdotCOM Correspondent Rick Lockridge contributed to this report

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Blackberry
Motorola
GoAmerica

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