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Japanese pagers to issue last beeps on Tuesday, ending 50-year run
- tyingq 7y agoI do sort of miss having a separate device for work, that work paid for, and that I could turn off when not on call. The two way pagers with the qwerty keyboard were pretty nice.
- tehlike 7y agoSome companies would still pay for separate work device.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- autotune 7y agoMy company just straight up pays everyone $60 extra a month for cell phone use and lets us do what we want with that. Works out well imho.
- na85 7y ago>The two way pagers with the qwerty keyboard were pretty nice. The modern equivalent of this is a Blackberry device. My employer provides work phones (a mix of iDevices, Samsung garbage, and blackberries) and even though I think the BB10 OS was a total failure as a consumer product, for a work device where I had no desire for Snapchat or whatever, my old BlackBerry was perfect. All I need in a work phone is a solid email/SMS platform and my employer-provided iPhone X is way overpowered for that use case.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- 29083011397778 7y ago> My employer provides... blackberries If it's still an option, I'd be amazed you don't take it. I still have and love my Q10, but Wire has upped their minimum API level to 5.0 (above the runtime RIM shipped).
- mc32 7y agoI know there are companies for which you BYOD your smartphone, but then they want to MDM that device of yours to protect company data. Ha!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pard68 7y agoI just don't bring my own device.
- zifnab06 7y agoGoogle has this neat implementation on Android where your work applications end up in a seperate profile that the company can manage. They can erase that profile but they can't see or manage any data outside of it. This is the only way I'll ever allow work things on my phone.
- faceplanted 7y agoAre there instructions on this anywhere? I get really annoyed at the MDM from my work email, which I can just get through the browser, but without it set up, I can't get work calendar notifications, which I do actually need.
- ptha 7y agoSome further info on Work Profiles from Google: https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/6191949?hl=en https://support.google.com/work/android/answer/6191949?hl=en
- GhettoMaestro 7y agoApple has something similar to this now as well.
- walshemj 7y agoNo just buy me a second device already if you want me to carry it and an on call agreement
- awad 7y agoCurious what the state of the market is...does your employer neither provide a device + service on their dime or a cash outlay that you could use for a device + service?
- tyingq 7y agoThey don't, but even if they did, dealing with a second phone is cumbersome around size, charging, distinct ringtones, silencing both for meetings, etc. The pager was just so simple. The Motorola T900 was very small, and ran 2 weeks or so on a single AA. I do get it's probably a bit of real and a bit of nostalgia.
- awad 7y agoSure, I hear you on that...but given the realities of today I am curious what you would prefer?
- jake_morrison 7y agoSomething built into my Apple watch, maybe, that's my "notification" device. And it would be nice if it didn't cost $10/month to the carrier.
- ansible 7y agoI wonder if dual-SIM phones have the capability of setting call acceptance rules based on a schedule.
- sverige 7y agoThe dual-SIM phone I have doesn't, but it's an old Nokia-like candy bar phone made in Russia. That would be a very nice feature. Wish the U.S. would open its market to dual-SIM phones, but I guess the equipment manufacturers fear losing sales. It's really dumb.
- red_phone 7y agoRecent iPhone models can handle multiple SIMs, but only one physical SIM card. The rest have to be eSIMs.
- icebraining 7y agoYou can get an "international model" of the Moto G on Amazon, then use Tasker to enable/disable one of the SIMs at a set schedule.
- magduf 7y agoHow does the US prevent the sale of dual-SIM phones? Most likely, it doesn't, they just don't sell them here because no one would buy them. I'm pretty sure you can get one off eBay and use it if you want. There's a lot of things you can't easily buy in the US, but it's not because of some grand conspiracy, it's because American consumers wouldn't buy enough of those things to make it profitable to sell them. PC computers pre-loaded with Linux is one example (it's been tried, multiple times). Another example is "washlet" toilet seats, which almost every toilet in Japan is outfitted with. They were invented in the US, but good luck buying one here, though any appliance store in Japan will have them. They don't sell them in America because almost no one would buy them, because Americans just aren't as hygienic as Japanese.
- allset_ 7y agoI haven't seen this, but things like PagerDuty solve this. If you're not on call, your phone doesn't ring.
- allset_ 7y agoThose aren't that uncommon. We have the choice between a work provided phone and carrying 2 phones when on call, or a BYOD situation with a credit on our cell phone bill and only one phone. Either way, PagerDuty only rings us when we're on call.
- shifto 7y agoWe get a phone and sim from work. You could use it in a dual-sim phone along with your private sim (as a lot of colleagues do) but I choose to have separate phones. It's an Iphone SE, so not much bigger than a pager.
- jake_morrison 7y agoIt is funny to see these technologies being shut down right when they are useful for IoT. I was building LED displays for bus stops to show information about the next bus. I found pagers to be a great match: cheap chips with integrated support for communications and displays, low costs for small text messages, great network coverage. But then the telecoms started shutting down the networks. Now we are seeing the same thing with the push to 5G. I don't want 5G, I want 2G. Before there was TCP/IP over cellular networks, we had cellular packet data. Very power and network efficient, it was the basis for things like BlackBerry's push email. Now the 2G patents are expiring, so it could be cheap and ubiquitous, built into everything. But instead the 2G networks are getting shut down...
- toomuchtodo 7y agoHave you tried LoRa? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LoRa
- mikepurvis 7y agoLoRa probably works great, but I think the parent's point is that there are extremely mature, low-cost technologies that are a perfect fit already for their need and have existed for decades. It's frustrating to have those technologies disappearing and have to choose between either something mainstream that's more expensive or a handful of more novel things any of which might turn out to be a flash in the pan and a support nightmare down the road.
- awad 7y agoI'm neither smart enough or well-connected enough to even hazard a guess but I wonder if there's an opportunity to acquire the older radio broadcasting assets and make them useful?
- planteen 7y agoSure, you could get the equipment for next to nothing. But without a spectrum license it's useless.
- medymed 7y agoI love pagers. Sometimes I carry three for three different hospitals. There is no risk of malfunction due to automatic software updates when the software does not update. There is no chatty distraction of text platforms. Functionality is not affected by changes to volume or mute status as it might be on a heavily used phone. The wavelengths used reportedly have better penetration deep into buildings with shielded areas like around MR machines. They are bulky, and it would be hard to forget that one is on call when they are strapped to the waistband/belt. When the pager goes off, it doesn't bother other people because they either don't know what it is or know it's a medical issue and is acceptable. The major problem is that I constantly 'hear' my pager going off when other devices beep in a roughly-similar fashion even when I'm not wearing it and my heart starts racing, so I have to change the ringtone frequently to de-Pavlov myself.
- macintux 7y agoI’m a big fan of them for technical on-call for those reasons, plus the better battery life. Much more reliable than cell phones.
- suls 7y agoIt’s the first time I’ve read about Pavlov. What are you referencing if I may ask?
- joatmon-snoo 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlov%27s_Dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlov%27s_Dog
- ekianjo 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Infernal 7y ago
- dzhiurgis 7y agoAnyone got pics of how pagers looked and worked in 1968?
- severine 7y agoAll I found is this: - Pager and It's Development: https://youtu.be/ebtppTU_sng?t=114 https://youtu.be/ebtppTU_sng?t=114 - Fancy Pager1970s Columbo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rybqMKo8kQk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rybqMKo8kQk
- tim333 7y agoHere's wikipedia on the pageboy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Pageboy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Pageboy
- kegal 7y agoEnd of an Era!
- nineteen999 7y agoWell in Japan I suppose. In other parts of the world, we have wide area paging networks that are still running strong. My team builds and maintains a paging network that covers an area around 2/3 the size of Japan.
- rfdave 7y agoNice. Which protocol are you using? How is equipment availability?
- nineteen999 7y agoPOCSAG. If you mean transmitters, we have a local supplier, no issues there.
- peter303 7y agoPagers several cell tower power failures, e.g. long term disasters like hurricanes. However they can fail in satellite failures, e.g. rare solar coronal mass ejections.
- joyjoyjoy 7y agoThat is sad. Biggest advantage of a beeper over a cell phone? Privacy. The beeper just receives and does not send your location.
- herbstein 7y agoEh. In some aspects, sure. But everything sent to your pager is trivial to intercept, as it is simply sent in clear text.
- davidbanham 7y agoI’d love to be able to ditch my pager and rely solely on smartphone apps. Unfortunately there’s no way to get our alerting apps to override silent mode on iOS and they’re patchy on Android. So I keep a pager next to my bed to make sure I get woken up if something’s on fire.
- jonnycomputer 7y agoThey should all go off at once for a last hurrah. All ten of them.
- ryanmercer 7y agoI miss having a pager in the 90s and early 2ks. I basically could go anywhere I wanted, or be on the internet when my parents weren't home, and all they had to do was page me and I'd know I either needed to come home, call them ASAP or call them immediately. I still remember the number too but don't remember a few of my phone numbers.
- partingshots 7y agoIt feels as if Japan decided one day to just stop progressing. Lots of little things like this along with flip phones still being popular seem to emphasize a sort of complacent stagnation. That’s probably a little to harsh, but there’s definitely a feeling of slowness to me.
- lunchables 7y agoIt is actually growing rapidly in Japan. But I think one reason that smartphone usage in adults in Japan is lower than other developed countries is because of their aging population. Their birthrates have been so low, it is hard to offset an aging population who are living longer and are unlikely to adopt smartphones.
- t34543 7y agoOne way pagers are the last bastion of privacy friendly wireless communication.