Of course the real value of this addition to your PalmPilot is the support for wireless messaging integrated into your personal organizer. With paging service from PageMart Wireless, you can receive word messages up to 300 characters long. Business associates, family and friends can send you information when you are traveling. Your word messaging service includes an email address from PageMart; email header information can be forwarded to you so that you don't have to worry about finding a phone jack somewhere just to see if you have email waiting. Instead, you can wirelessly receive the information and determine the importance of the message.

The Pager Card for the PalmPilot also offers you another great feature called SENDER ID. With Sender ID, if someone sends you a numeric page, you need not try to guess who that number represents. The Pager Application automatically cross references phone numbers to your Address List in the PalmPilot as shown in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Sender ID automatically cross references the phone number to PageMart Wireless. Also shown is the time and date the message was received.

Not only do you see the cross referenced phone number to the data in the Telephone Directory (i.e., PageMart Wireless) but you see the time and date the message was received as well as a "message sequence number". The message sequence number is a system where every personal message is preceded by a number. The reason for this is so that if you miss a message while traveling on a plane, the paging application will tell you that you've missed messages once you receive your next message. For example, if you receive message 25 and the last message received was 23, you will receive a notice that you've missed a message. If that occurs, a toll-free call to PageMart's message retrieval service allows you to retransmit the text message or messages to your PalmPilot. Numeric messages are read back to you over the telephone or can be retransmitted.

Developers kits
Although the resident Pager Application has some great features, Motorola, PageMart, the Windward Group and 3Com want to encourage developers to develop "cool" features that will utilize the paging technology. As a user of the PalmPilot, you've probably already added some great applications, utilities or games to your PalmPilot. To encourage third party development, Motorola will be selling a Developers Kit to support the development community. If you are a PalmPilot developer, then you will find the new Developers Kit easy to use. The kits will be available at the same time the Pager Card for the PalmPilot becomes available, which is about a month away.

If you are a developer, I'm sure some of you are asking; "why can't I get the SDK (software developers kit) now so I can develop the applications before the product hits the street?" To develop applications for the Pager Card, you need hardware too. Specifically, the new Pager Card. You will need the Pager Card to receive a message and test your applications and Motorola wants you to have a Pager Card that represents production product with the ability to receive a message as reliably as a regular pager. Therefore we have to wait until our Pager Card Beta testing is completed.