I had an interesting conversation about wireless communications with the maintenance manager of the downtown Denver hotel where RCR had its recent editorial staff meeting. He is the supervisor for several center-city hotels. His wife is a sales rep whose territory covers the greater Denver area. They seem like the perfect couple for target marketing.
They both insisted on digital cellular phones, and they both carry pagers, although they wish they didn’t need two devices. They like the whiz-bang features digital offers, but for wide area and in-building coverage, plain old cellular and paging clearly are superior. Or, as James Earl Jones says for Bell Atlantic Mobile, “the phone is only as good as the network it’s on.”
We’ve got dual-mode and tri-mode and personal digital assistants. We’re talking 3G and Web surfing phones. Why not a handset that incorporates a bona fide pager when, after all, wireless telcos are reselling paging services?
Technologically infeasible and functionally impractical, an executive of a large paging carrier told me. Motorola Inc. trialed a numeric pager-cell phone combo during the early 1990s, and consumers loved it, Joshua P. Kiem, marketing director of the company’s cellular subscriber sector, said. The pager function, which used little juice, remained on all the time, and it offered an automatic wireless phone dial-back feature to the received call number.
The device never made it to market for a variety of reasons, however. Because the pager was invisible to consumers, they could not understand why the combination product was larger and cost more, Kiem said.
“Distribution became a big issue because telcos don’t want to be responsible for the full pay-down of a phone that won’t be on all the time to receive calls,” he added.
Alternatively, manufacturers are working on low-cost transports, like infrared, to beam information automatically between a handset and a pager, Kiem said.
OK, OK, perhaps I stand corrected. But it still seems to me that those high-use consumers who must carry two devices also are paying extra for the privilege of being inconvenienced by the need to have both. I say, give this idea another shot. The early 1990s is ancient history in the wireless industry.
Which company will bring us the mobile communications version of the Swiss Army knife, the clock radio, the pencil with the eraser? Classics that never go out of style.
Sure it’s a gamble. So is the entire high-technology sector, which seems to follow this adage: “They said it couldn’t be done, but we didn’t know any better so we went ahead and did it anyway.”
