It's digital convergence in action, baby. We all have a Palm device, pager, and cellular phone. How often have you wished that the lot of these devices was a single, integrated package? The first part of this wonder equation has come together. PageMart, using technology from Motorola and 3Com, has created a 2MB expansion card for all Palm devices (except Palm III), which combines the Palm III OS with Motorola's FLEX paging technology. If you're a Palm junkie who carries his handheld everywhere including the bathroom, throw away your pager and run out and purchase this card.
It seems that developers either write incredibly poor documentation or simply wonderful documentation. Fortunately, Synapse ships with the later. In addition to the Palm III books and CD-ROM, you receive a quickstart guide, a 40-page guide to operating the pager card and its software, a pamphlet dedicated to coverage plans, a coverage map of the US and a guide, which outlines the 6 different ways to send a message. Well done, indeed.
Installing Synapse, like any other Palm product is a breeze. Hotsync your data, remove the old memory card, install the new one, perform a soft reset and re-Hotsync. You do need to reinstall all the software that was on your old memory card, but overall you'll find the process to take about 15 minutes, if you keep all of your Palm software nearby.
The last step is setting up service for the device. The included pamphlet covers all of your options clearly. For example, $19.95/month buys you alphanumeric paging, standard voice mail and a standard set of ways for paging the card. These include email, website, and PageLauncher software. If you pay an additional fee for one of the expanded services, you get the option of calling an operator who will transcribe the message and send it for you. I recommend visiting their website to see all of the options. They're numerous.
Once everything is up and cooking you'll find it ironic, that the Synapse Pager Card, which comes with Palm OS 3 built-in, doesn't work with the Palm III. The paging unit though diminutive in size and weight, requires a new memory door that bubbles out to accept its increased girth. (Fortunately, the larger unit is not an annoyance.) Because you must physically disassemble a Palm III to get to its memory card, there is no way currently to install this card inside 3Com's latest creation. The other piece of bad news is that IR is not supported in this package. Should you upgrade your Pilot 1000, 5000, PalmPilot or Workpad, your device becomes a Palm III with the exception of the Infrared beaming. This is more than a bummer because IR was one of the more impressive features of Palm III. Finally, leaving the pager card on 24 hours a day will impact the battery life of your Palm device. Pagemart predicts 2-4 weeks of battery life with the unit on constantly. I would agree with this. I've noticed a faster than normal battery drain over the past few days.
Now that you've been introduced to Synapse's beauty flaws, let's take a look at what you do you get and what it does right. Synapse can receive alphanumeric (up to 300 characters) pages regardless if your Palm is on or off. The pager card will notify you with visual and/or audible alerts. In the audible category there are several sounds to choose from, but the pager card does not have a vibrate option. You can set two different alerts. One is for general pages and the other for news updates, if you subscribe to the service. In addition, you can set a Quiet Time for the pager. Choose repeating blocks of time in a day and your Synapse Pager Card will accept the pages, but not notify you.
Additionally, Synapse has some added features to ensure that you don't miss a page due to a poor connection or because you intentionally shut the device off. Each page is assigned a sequence number. If your pager receives two pages that are out of sequence, you can opt to have it notify you. Additionally, it can detect when a garbled page comes in. Using error correction, the pager card will underline the offending characters in the message and alert you. To combat these two problems, which happen with all pagers, PageMart offers a feature where you call an 800 number, type in your pager ID and PIN and the system resends the previous few pages.
Should a numeric page come through alone, the software will perform a lookup in the Address program and attempt to match the phone number to a name. In a way, it gives you Caller ID. One other cool feature is support for vCalendar™ updates. These are specially formatted messages that when received can automatically update the Date Book program with a meeting.
I received the pages I sent myself, most of the time. I work in the basement of a building, at least until the end of July. Down there I received one and half of the four pages I sent. I used both email and Pagemart's website to page the card. A couple of messages didn't get through, one came through fine and the fourth one had missing characters. Once I went outside all of the pages came through without issue and Synapse notified me that I might have missed pages and that I should call Pagemart's 800 number. In all cases, there was a noticeable minute delay between the time I sent the page and when my Palm received it. I have friends with regular pagers. When I visit the website to page them, they receive it within a few seconds. Overall, it isn't a big issue, but it is an annoyance. In terms of what gets through, the Synapse is on par with the best Motorola pagers out there. If a page can make it to a regular pager, it can make to Synapse.
The Synapse Pager Card is one of the more impressive pieces of hardware to be released
for the Palm platform. At $169, which includes a Palm III upgrade, Synapse strikes
you as a bargain. It does everything as advertised and then some. The added
features of knowing a page is missed, being able to set quiet time, and having the
software do address book look-ups on names are great features. The design of the
device adds little to the size or weight of a Palm device, which is another bonus.
Wrap all this up with a Palm III upgrade and splendid documentation and you get digital
convergence, for real.
-Scott Sbihli