Rewind No. 1: Easy Call Pagers

Before I had my first mobile phone, I first owned a pager. Most kids today won't probably know what a pager is and might find the concept ridiculous; and that is if they would even allow themselves to know what it is. But it was hip to have a pager in the '90s. Easy Call and Pocketbell were the dominant industry players. They were that era's Smart and Globe of today.


I still remember the excitement in our office when pagers were assigned to writers so that we could send instant one-line updates to whoever needed it in the office or in the field. I forgot now how long was a pager-user-number which we had to give to message handling specialists, as they were called, along with the message that we wanted to send to the owner of that number. Unlike today's SMS which allows us to compose and send our own text messages, back in the paging days we had to call up Easy Call or Pocketbell message handling specialists and carefully dictate to them our message/s. They would be the ones to send it to the party we want to reach. How straightforward and instant was that?

Oh, I remember that they were also called "beepers". When pagers beeped, people would immediately take their units off the holsters which men usually clipped to their belts while women have them attached to their bags. By pushing one of the three buttons, users can read their message/s that scroll across the pager's tiny green screen. It seems so crude now, but the pager served its purpose well until the advent of SMS or texting via mobile phones.

This old print ad by EasyCall Communications Philippines Inc. (ECPI) puts me in this nostalgic mood and made me wonder what happened to this company. A quick online search took me directly to ECPI's website that confidently states how the company managed to change with the times.

Currently, ECPI offers Internet services that include Internet Access through dial up or leased line connections; Dedicated Access Service Features – domain name registration, configuration of customer premise equipment (“CPE”); leased lines installation and end-to-end circuit testing; Web Based Solutions – website development, web hosting, web applications development and Internet Data Center – 24 x 7 co-location services.

Through partnerships, Easy Call also now engages in call center operations and IT-related outsourcing services.

Pocketbell, on the other hand, also left the paging business and went into Internet services. Owned by Philippine Wireless, Inc., Pocketbell seemed to have reinvented itself "as the service provider of the SMS/texting service innovation called TEXTWISE, a prepaid international text service that allows subscribers to send international bound messages for only P5.00 per text abroad." I don't know how current this data is, but it's the best online data I found on this company so far.

Today, a simple mobile phone with basic color screen won't cut it for most of us. We have become gluttons and oversharers of information, making high-end smartphones almost the de facto standard in handsets today. The old days certainly got their own charm, but I can't go back to that time when we would say "Page me" instead of "Text me". Cannot.