Where have all the pagers gone?
Thursday, November 13th, 2008There was an interesting thread on Slashdot the other day that raises some great points about how to best stay alerted to IT problems. Most people these days have migrated to notification via cell phone, Blackberry, etc. Personally, I’ve switched to an iPhone earlier this year and have been very satisfied with it. I’m not one to normally drink the Apple kool-aid, but with it’s incredible screen and the release of several good SSH clients it has proven to be a very useful tool for sysadmins and other people that have to respond to emergencies while out and about.
That is, except for it’s really sub-par SMS support. Compared to old-school pagers, which could be set to wake even the deepest sleeper, the iPhone’s SMS options are surprising limited. None of the standard SMS tones is even remotely jarring enough, vibrate mode is easily missed if the phone’s in your pocket, and Apple for some reason chose not to allow you upload custom SMS tones like you can ringtones.
At least with the 2.1 firmware release they now sound the SMS tone three times if you don’t acknowledge it. A step in the right direction, but there’s still a long way to go. I’m surprised that some enterprising developer hasn’t written a quick program to give you more control over the SMS configuration - I’d happily pay good money for something like this if Apple isn’t able to solve this.
There are some other options - we’ve considered using a service such as email2phone to convert emails into phone calls that can trigger a special ringtone for alerts. But then you run into issues with possible email delays, etc. to work around what should be a pretty simple problem to solve.
Share your experience in the comments - how satisfied are you with your mobile device? Any recommendations of phones that work great as pagers? Or others in particular to avoid?
