Cell phones & pagers

Home Office Computing, Oct, 1998 by Douglas Gantenbein

With one of these seven wireless digital phones or four beepers, you'll stay connected without being tied down

Used a cell phone or pager recently? If not, you're in for some surprises when you next shop for one. Wireless communication devices have made a quantum leap in the past two years. Cellular phones offer better service, more features, and innovative handsets that slip into a pocket or clip onto your belt--and batteries that mean a day spent on the phone doesn't mean lugging a suitcase of spares. In fact, today's digital cell phones combine a clearer signal with better privacy--nosy snoopers can't listen in to digital cell phone calls with police scanners. And pagers do more than simply buzz you and leave a cryptic number to call; they collect e-mail, receive text messages, chirp Beethoven's Ninth, and even send return messages.

In particular, digital cell phones today have made dramatic advances in three areas: services, ergonomics, and standby/talk time.

Services Why use a phone only to talk, when you can do so much more? The data-transmission capabilities of digital phone services mean that providers can send a growing array of stuff to your pocket.

Voice messaging, paging, e-mail receiving, three-way calling, caller ID--the list goes on. Reading all this information is made easier by the larger display screens most handsets now feature. And one phone in this Buyer's Guide, the Siemens S 12, even has a gorgeous four-color LCD for easy on-the-eyes dialing and email reading. And as we mentioned, digital transmission also reduces the chance of your conversations being overheard or service stolen.

Ergonomics Cell phones of a few years back were like early VCRs--darn near impossible to decipher. "Early phones had a whole lot of buttons for Recall and Send and Store and Power and Function," says Mike Coad, vice president for subscriber equipment for Sprint PCS. "And these buttons didn't do a whole lot. Now equipment providers are trying to simplify that design, providing you with more functions but fewer and simpler buttons."

Some changes are small but significant, such as the replacement of the once-ubiquitous Send button--which actually meant either Call or Answer--with the more obvious Talk. Some wireless phones--such as the Sony CM-Z100 and Qualcomm QCP-820--now employ thumb-operated dials that scroll through various functions displayed on the screen, such as ring volume, phone directory, and most recent calls. You can push the dial to activate desired functions just as you would a mouse button.

Wireless telephones also continue to shrink in size. As little as five years ago, the average cellular phone looked like a brick with an antenna stuck in one end. It felt like one, too.

So it was natural that Motorola's tiny StarTac caused a sensation when it hit the market two years ago. Now, however, a number of telephones have such wearable capability. Of course, the obvious downside to this shrinkage is that losing a wireless phone has never been easier.

Standby/Talk Time Not long ago, a cell phone's battery croaked after a day on standby; actual talk time lasted barely a few hours. Battery life still varies depending on type of phone and frequency of use. But new-generation lithium-ion batteries and more efficient digital phones, such as the ones reviewed here, have combined to offer standby times of more than 100 hours, along with up to 20 to 30 hours of talk time.

What about pagers? It seems these little gadgets would be hard-pressed to keep up with their chatty wireless cousins, most of whom now can handle paging functions. But pagers are cheaper and more compact than phones, and when coupled with a battery, can be hooked to a belt as part of everyday life. Pagers also have wider broadcast range, with most paging companies operating nationwide services that make it nearly impossible to travel out of your coverage area.

Pagers also continue to grow in technological sophistication. Most alphanumeric pagers (a fancy way to say they receive both letters and numbers) display as many as four lines of text and can store 20 or more messages. Pagers also do more than simply retrieve messages. They can receive and return e-mail, update stocks, and remind you of appointments. Just entering the technology pipeline are two-way pagers that even permit return messages or queries sent to Web sites to collect data on everything from travel to business competitors.

For this Buyer's Guide, we selected seven digital cell phones and four pagers that represent the best of what's available today. We evaluated these devices on the basis of convenience, features, ease of use, and call or reception quality. For our tests, we took the phones outside our home office and into streets, parks, corporate offices, and tunnels to measure the strength and clarity of their signals.

Prices given are estimated street prices; the actual purchase price will depend on whether you buy a phone with a calling plan from a wireless carrier and on the type of plan.