Lots of people believe that cell phones have replaced pagers, but I disagree. First of all, in my area, cell phones have a lot of dead spots, and in-building coverage is poor. Pagers work well in places that cell phones don't. Most paging systems use multiple high-powered transmitters high atop mountains and tall buildings, giving them many (sometimes hundreds) miles range each. In most major cities, many paging transmitters simulcast and have overlapping covereage which adds to the sum of signal available to reach you. For you cell-generation, text-thumbed kids out there, that means '5 signal bars all the time no matter what'. Another major advantage to paging over cell phones for messaging is cost. The least expensive cellular provider's unlimited non-network messaging plan (as of this writing) is almost $30 per month. Alphanumeric paging from our provider is less than $10 per month. And, no matter how many emails are sent, the cost is the same. In addition to the email-to-pager access, each pager also receives its own phone number for 'unplugged' access to my personnel. I can just call the individual pager number and either enter my phone number or leave a voicemail. Then, the person gets a page saying 'voicemail waiting' and whalla! I contacted an IT person even though I don't have a computer. Awesome!

Another cell-phone negative is battery life. I don't know about you, but my cell phone is good for about 3 days TOPS before the battery is dead. My Advisor Elite pagers usually go for nearly 3 months per battery!

Mostly, I use pagers to send copies of support account emails to my support people. In other words, when a customer sends an email for support, the email lands in the appropriate email inbox and a copy of it is sent to that department's pager as well. Obviously, the emails sent to the pagers are nice because it frees you from having to be glued to your computer all the time! You know what is waiting for you in your email inbox, saving constant monitoring. Instead you can be on the go and only access your email by computer when there is an emergency or a need to do so.

The advisor Elite has large, easy to use buttons that make navigating it easy. What I really like about this is ease of use. Even an old coot (like me) that can't figure out a simple cellphone can use the Advisor Elite pager. The screen is a bit small, but the font is easy to read. The blue colored backlight makes reading in the dark much easier than the Advisor Gold that has an incandescent bulb on one side of its screen. The alert tones are nice and loud. On my pager, I mostly use the 'chirp' alert tone because it is non-obtrusive. When going into a restaurant or theater, I just select the vibrate mode. The Advisor Elite has an internal memory battery that allows the pager to retain messages and keep time while you change the single 'AA' battery when it is dead. The screen has a battery level meter on it to tell you when you are getting close to needing a new battery.

The Advisor Elite is similar to the Advisor Gold pager in many ways. The 4-line display, easy to use buttons, size, etc. Where it differs is in the use of the Flex paging protocol. Flex is a method of speeding up the baud rate while improving message reliability and range. As baud rates speed up on Pocsag and Golay pagers, the range of each transmitter decreases. With Flex, that problem, as well as problems associated with poor multicast transmitter timing is reduced. But, that's not even the best part! For the user, regardless of what paging protocol used, there is very little they would notice, except with Flex. A pager using Flex has about 3-4 times the battery life as a pager using Pocsag or Golay (like the Advisor Gold). In other words, your battery should last about 2-4 months with an Advisor Elite.

The way this works is, the Advisor pager knows when the paging network is going to send Flex packets, and when it is not. So, the pager goes into a 'sleep' mode while other paging protocol messages are sent, and wakes up only when it knows Flex messages will be sent. This way, you are not wasting battery life on pages not even remotely intended for your unit.

When Motorola stopped making the Advisor Elite (they still make the Advisor Gold), they sold the rights and tooling to a company called Unication in Korea. Unfortunately, Unication changed some things about the Advisor Elite which are undesirable, at least to me. For instance, Unication Elites differ from Motorola built Elites in screen contrast and readability. The Motorola screens have sharp black colored text on a goldish color background while Unication Elites use blue text on a grey background. Also, it feels like Unication Elites might use a cheaper plastic for the cases. Also, Unication pagers have trouble with interference rejection, leading me to believe that they may have changed some internal things as well. Last, Unication's backlighting is not as bright as Motorola. Short story- If in the market for one of these pagers, see if you can find a used Motorola first. If not, a new Unication is better than nothing.

Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 90