Beepwear: A multiporpose watch

Beepwear: A multiporpose watch

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Think of wristwatches that are made in the U.S.,
and Timex comes to mind. While watches from this watchmaker may
be perpetually on sale in stores like Woolworths and Longs &
Drugs in the U.S., you'll also be able to find its line of "high
end" and "high tech" ones.

Do you remember DataLink, the watch plus organizer that can
synchronize its data -- phone numbers and appointments -- with
the one stored on your PC? It is also a Timex product.

So what do you get when Timex works together with Motorola? It
is Beepwear, a watch that is also a pager. Courtesy of PT Sky
Telindo Services, I was able to play around and have a lot of fun
with a Beepwear.

This wearable pager has all paging capabilities that you would
expect from a full-featured pager, complete with different beep
sounds and a silent mode operation. It can receive and store as
many as 16 alphanumeric messages of up to 104 characters each. It
uses the 900 Hz Flex technology from Motorola, and it is
available here for US$129. Here, as well as in the U.S., SkyTel
is the exclusive service provider for Beepwear. While it commands
such a steep price in rupiah terms, if you have money to burn and
you have always lost your previous beepers, you may like this
one.

The display is sharp and the text is easy to read. Beepwear
will sound a distinct alarm when it receives a paging message.
The screen will say "1 New Message". Press a button, and the
message will scroll from right to left. If it's too dark to read
the LCD, you can press another button and the INDIGLO night
lighting will make the screen far more readable.

The watch can also function as a 100-hour stopwatch and can
display two different time zones, making it a good companion for
international travelers. In the U.S., Beepwear also displays
news, weather and sports updates from SkyTel. In Indonesia,
SkyTel provides these updates through its SkyInfo service.

There are still some problems that need to be addressed,
though. In my test, the battery did not last as long as the more
usual types of pagers, although the information on its Web site
claims that it should last two to three months. Fortunately,
replacing the standard hearing-aid battery is not difficult to
do.

The watchbands also need some design work; they are too bulky
for those with less than macho-like arms. Luckily, Beepwear comes
with accessories to transform it into a cute pocket pager.
Disassemble the bands, which is easily done, and place the watch
in its cradle. You can even attach the belt clip to it to make
sure it will not be lost. Or hang it around your neck like a
pendant.

The watch itself may not go very well with your business
attire, and Timex should work on making it sleeker. Yet it is a
very practical solution, especially for absent-minded people like
me who often realize we have left our pagers somewhere -- usually
at home -- when we are already too far on our way to turn around
just to fetch it.

Those who use personal organizers can opt for the upcoming
Beepwear Pro, which is a combination of a watch, a Motorola pager
and an organizer that can store up to 150 contact numbers.

E-mail Paging

Here's a very useful service that SkyTel is making available
to its customers. It's not officially launched yet, as Ade
Meyliala, the company's marketing executive, has informed me, but
her customers can already use it.

This service allows anybody from anywhere in the world to send
a page to a SkyTel pager in Indonesia by e-mail. All you have to
do is send an e-mail to sendpage@skytel.co.id. You have to leave
the cc and bcc lines blank, add the pager ID number in the
Subject line, and type in your message in the usual place. You
can send the same message to up to four pagers at the same time.
All the ID numbers should be added to the Subject line, separated
only with a space.

I like the service very much, because it allows me to send
unlimited number of pages to my wife when I'm on an overseas trip
without having to pay for any international call. The message
will be sent to her pager the moment the e-mail reaches SkyTel's
server. In addition to being able to get my message across
quickly, I can also send her personal messages that I might find
difficult to dictate to an operator. Furthermore, those who
prefer to use their own mother tongues will also appreciate the
ability to send pager messages by e-mail.

However, according to Ade, your pager needs to be activated
before it can receive messages sent through e-mail, and you have
to contact the company to request the activation.

Now, what about the possibility of receiving harassing
messages through e-mail? Not much, because when you receive the
message by e-mail, the identity of the e-mail sender will
automatically be included as part of the message and will appear
on the pager's screen. But there will still be a possibility that
a hacker will be able to forge his own e-mail address and dump
all kinds of junk on your pager.

Still under construction is the facility to send messages to
pagers from several of our Web sites, including indosat.net,
vision.net and wasantara.net. When the facility is there, you can
fill in a form and click a button, and the message will be send
to the pager. Other pager services such as Multipage and StarPage
are also working with these Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to
provide this service.

Notification

Wouldn't it be nice to get notified by the beep of your pager
every time you receive an e-mail? Some ISPs have already included
this capability in their services. You can request that each time
an e-mail arrives in your mailbox, your ISP sends a notification
to your pager. The message itself will not be forwarded, though.
You will know who the sender is and what time he sent his e-mail.

Unlike in Singapore and even the U.S., the pager is still not
very much in use in Indonesia because it is not really a status
symbol. Besides, as Megawaty Khie, SkyTel's marketing manager,
reminded me, people prefer using their cellular phones because
finding a working public phone is quite difficult, even in
Jakarta. She definitely has a point there.