PalmPilot: The Ultimate Guide, Second Edition

Chapter 15. Paging, Faxing, Printing, and Beaming

This chapter shouldn’t exist at all. As originally conceived, the PalmPilot was never intended to serve as a beeper, fax machine, infrared transmitter, or printout-generating computer. You were supposed to let your desktop computer do all of that stuff, and use the PalmPilot to look up the occasional phone number or appointment.

But the fans wouldn’t sit still. Today, you can find software or hardware that lets the PalmPilot perform all of those amazing connectivity stunts, taking it far beyond the realm of simple data bucket.

Paging

Talk about technology convergence: thanks to a collaboration of 3Com (who makes the PalmPilot), Motorola (who makes beepers), and PageMart (who sells pager subscriptions), your PalmPilot can also serve as a beeper. You’ve got one less gadget to clip to your belt.

The concept is simple enough: for $170, you get the Synapse Pager Card, a replacement for the memory card in any Pilot, PalmPilot, or early WorkPad model; just slide off the plastic cover for this card (on the back of the PalmPilot), pull out the existing memory card, and slide in your new, pager-enhanced card. As a bonus, the replacement card has two megabytes of memory, doubling or quadrupling the memory of all Pilot and PalmPilot models. You also get a replacement door for this memory-card slot—a door that bulges out slightly to accommodate the bulkier electronics on the card itself. Unfortunately, the pager card isn’t available for the Palm ...