Take a Motorola PageWriter 2000X out in a crowd and heads turn. People are amazed. Okay, so maybe that's not reason enough to have one, but give me a minute, maybe I can convince you.

I'll go ahead and get the worst thing about it out first, then I can focus on the good stuff. It's big. It's really big and heavy.

Anyway, as I was saying, I love this pager. I don't even think it's fair to call it a pager. It's a wireless email device and PDA, which also happens to have paging among it's many features. I have both a local (408) and a toll-free (888) number for my pager, but most people just use the email address or the carrier’s web site when they want to “page” me. When I receive the message I can ignore it, call them back on my cell phone (which I also reviewed, check it out!) reply with a canned message, or type a custom message on the full qwerty keyboard. The keyboard is tiny but I’m used to it and can type pretty fast with it. The screen and keyboard are backlit, so I can use it in the dark with now problem. (Be careful with this, I drew a lot of attention in a planetarium one day trying to tell my wife I love her!)

I get updates several times a day on sports, news, weather, horoscopes, movies, and the stock market. They show up in the inbox like emails but don’t beep to alert you unless you want them to.

It has somewhere around 800K of memory, which is plenty to hold messages, applications, and contacts.

Applications? Yes, that’s right. You can add new programs to it. It comes with the basic email program, an address book, 3 alarm clocks, a scheduler, a to-do manager, a notepad, and a program you can use to compose songs for it to play when you get paged. To that I have added a few programs I downloaded from mot.com, including a battleship game, blackjack, minesweeper, and a program that displays pictures.

The program that displays pictures is pretty useless, but it does demonstrate the quality of the screen. I keep it just to show people how good it is. Granted it’s no laptop screen, but it also fits in your pocket! The screen is very large and can display 9 lines of text at a time.

I don’t think Motorola could have made it much easier to use. The main menu is wheel that spins around so you can select the option you want. They didn’t need to make it complicated to navigate because you have a full keyboard at your disposal.

If you have software such as Truesync you can synchronize your email, contacts, and schedule with Outlook (or whatever you use,) your PageWriter, and your web-based email. That really comes in handy if you travel a lot. To synchronize the PageWriter with your PC you just drop it in the recharging cradle. It communicates with the cradle through an infrared port on that back of the pager. The cradle connects to a serial port on your PC with a cable that is provided with the pager. This is also how you download new applications to the pager.

I know another important issue to consider is battery life. This pager comes with a rechargeable battery which charges in it’s cradle. I charge mine about every three days, that way it never drops below 50%. It charges in about an hour. I’m very happy with the battery life, particularly since I never have to buy batteries for it.

Overall this device is great. The size and weight are the only thing I can complain about. It’s incredibly useful to have access to email when you’re on the road. I can send email from my phone, but it takes way to long to type. With the PageWriter, it’s just like using a PC keyboard, only smaller.

After I show it to someone who has never seen one before the usual first question I get is, “why is this any better than a phone? You can’t talk to the people this way” I point to my phone and say, “No, I CAN talk to them, I just don’t HAVE to talk to them.”




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): Company owned