There are many considerations when buying a pager and service. For me, the biggest considerations were price and convenience. I chose the Motorola Pronto Flex pager and an accompanying service for these reasons: The pager is simple... a 2 button, numberic pager which gives the option of an audible or silent alert, up to 8 "protected," or saved pages, time stamping, and a spare battery holder. The accompanying service (called SourceOne at the time, but under new management as of January 2000), offered me two options for two different prices. I chose the service called "UltraPage" which included a toll-free pager number. This toll-free number, along with a simple automated system for changing your local receiving area (i.e.: free roaming), allowed me the convenience of moving without having to get a new service with a local pager number, and also allowed friends and relatives to page me without having to dial a long-distance number.

The pager itself cost $40... typical for a standard numeric pager. The price of the SourceOne service at the time came to a total of $80 for a year of service (service can also be paid monthly, but a one-year contract was cheaper per month). Not bad for a toll-free number and free roaming.

Here's the downside to the system: For one, the company doesn't have coverage all over. Smaller towns (such as Urbana, Illinois where I went to school), although being in the midwest coverage zone, does not have it's own coverage service, so I was unable to receive pages there when I was visiting. Also, the toll-free number, while a great feature, is accompanied by a "personal identification number." This means that people not only have to dial the common toll-free number to page me, but they must also put in a 7-digit ID# to specify my pager... a slight inconvenience, but worth it for the toll-free option.

The other service offered by the company is not as good. It's called "ForeverPage" and works like this: You don't pay for the service directly... but when someone wants to page you, they must pay 35 cents in order to complete the page. This, although not a lot of money, is an inconvenience to those paging you, and defeats the purpose of the toll-free number.



Recommended: Yes