Are you Sure S. Bull has an Unlisted Number?

A Little more than 100 years ago, General George Custer paid the ultimate price for not keeping in touch at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Today, anyone who wants to stay in the know can board a jet in New York that's bound, say, for Los Angeles and tote along a laptop computer equipped with a modem for easy access to another personal computer or a fax machine; a personal pager that delivers financial quotes, sports scores or a hot phone number to call; or a cellular phone that eliminates standing in line to make a phone call. Even while aloft, it's simple to conduct business from a cordless Airfone system while settling back for a second cup of coffee. So, Mr. Big, if you want to keep in touch--really keep in touch--here are the latest ways to do so.

The Cellular Connection

Car cellular phones have become so commonplace that it's almost impossible not to spot a driver of a BMW or a Jaguar who isn't conducting a conversation into space with one hand clamped to his ear. But if you want to stay ahead of your upwardly mobile phone buddies, the latest trend in cellular technology is the combination phone. Low-power portable models such as NEC's P300, Panasonic's EB-KJ3500 and Audiovox' CTX-5000 are now small enough to be toted in a purse or a raincoat pocket, and they have the unique ability to be quickly transformed into car phones. Prices range from $1300 to $2000.

The 10.7-ounce Motorola Micro TAC with a flip-up mouthpiece resembles a Star Trek communications device, though earth-to-orbit communication isn't one of its options. This portable phone, about the size of a checkbook, offers continuous talk time of 30 minutes using a snap-on slim battery or as much as 75 minutes of talk time with its heavier standard battery. It sells for about $2500-$3500, depending on which features are added.

Cellular communications will enter the digital age over the next few years as the proposed digital cellular standard becomes a reality. This new technology will deliver many more calls per cell with fewer busy signals. Don't expect this new system to be cheap. The first digital cellular phones will be much more expensive than the current crop.

Far-Reaching Fax

If your keep-in-touch wish list includes a fax machine built into every pay phone, don't hold your breath. But thanks to some innovative engineering, the age of the portable fax is here and with it will come the ability to use Airfone (more about this follows) or a phone booth as your personal facsimile-transmission center.

Weighing a scant seven pounds and measuring only about 9" x 12", the Nissei Courier 53 portable fax (continued on page 160) S. Bull (continued from page 96) machine ($1595) can fit inside a deep briefcase. It can be used with any standard telephone system or cellular phone via the acoustic coupler provided.

The PortaFax 96 ($1495) is a portable alternative when you have urgent information to transmit. This nine-pound unit offers all the standard features, plus optional international telephone adapters. And you can even plug it into a 12-volt car or boat receptacle using an optional converter. A sturdy protective case is included.

Fujitsu Imaging Systems of America has just added the dexExpress, a cellular mobile telephone facsimile, to its product line. In a nutshell, the dexExpress allows users to send and receive documents anywhere within the range of a mobile telephone. The entire unit, including the case, weighs about 19 pounds and can run on A.C. or D.C. current. The price is $2295.

Answering Machines and Services

Aside from its annoying habit of playing back messages such as "A trip to the Bahamas can be yours if you act now..." the answering machine is still the most popular way to keep in touch when you're away from home. The latest models can tell you the time and the date each message arrived, allow you to monitor the sounds in your house while you're gone, enable you to use a touch-tone phone for message retrieval and even forward your messages to another phone number. But what if you could have the convenience of an answering machine without the worry associated with mechanical failure or a full tape? Well, many local telephone companies are beginning to offer electronic answering services as a custom calling feature.

Called voice mail by some, these electronic answering services enable you to pick up a phone, punch in a specific code and record your outgoing message from any location. Likewise, you can retrieve your messages from anywhere via the use of a touch-tone phone and find out the time and the date each message was left. You say, "Well, sure, but my answering machine can do that." True, but can your answering machine take messages while your phone line is busy? Most can't--but voice mail can. Charges for this service will vary depending upon your location, but you can expect them to run less than ten dollars per phone line per month.

Pacer Propagation

The beeper, or pager, has become an increasingly popular way to, as AT&T puts it, "reach out and touch someone." Many models emit a soft beep and others vibrate to physically remind you that a message is waiting. Most pagers sport a one-line LCD that shows a caller's phone number in numerical digits, and many of these units also provide a number memory so you don't forget phone numbers on the way to a pay phone.

New-generation pagers are now available with alphanumeric capability. These devices can display messages of as many as 2000 characters on a scrolling screen. So it's possible for someone to call a central phone number, give an operator a message and have it show up on your pager as Mike Jones--312-555-1234 Or John Smith--Call Me--Urgent.

Another option in the paging game is the voice pager. Similar to the telephone company's voice-mail system, this pager beeps to tell you that a call has been received. You may then listen to the recorded message by calling a phone number and entering a code. Yet another and perhaps more functional voice-pager system has the ability to transmit a caller's recorded message directly to you via a pager with a built-in speaker.

While the standard pager does an excellent job of keeping you in touch on a local basis, its range is often limited to a 30-to-50-mile radius. If your business takes you out of town, Sky Tel's system provides access to any one of 110 service areas across the country, including Alaska and Hawaii. A caller wishing to reach you dials a toll-free number, enters your personal pager number and then his own telephone number. A computer relays the signal to a communications satellite, which in turn simultaneously broadcasts the signal to each downlink in the system. The signal is then routed to local paging transmitters and ends up in the form of a telephone number on your pager's LCD--within 30 seconds of the time the caller hangs up. SkyPager service is $69 per month, including the pager. For an extra $20 per month, you can also use SkyTalk service, which adds voice-mail capability.

A nationwide paging system called CUE utilizes satellite technology and local FM transmission. The CUE system covers more than 200 metropolitan areas in the continental United States, as well as Puerto Rico. This service is $55 per month and includes voice-mail capability. However, an additional 40 cents per minute is charged for each incoming voice message.

Finance to Go

In the world of high finance, brokers and anyone else heavily into the market need to know how their investments are doing at a moment's notice. In the past, this type of monitoring was extremely costly and required a special hard-wired terminal. Not anymore. Today, services are available that enable you to receive financial quotations whether you're walking on a busy Manhattan street or sitting by the pool at The Regent Beverly Wilshire.

The Lotus QuoTrek system provides quotes sent directly from the exchange floors to the Lotus Network Control Center. The information is processed instantly and broadcast via satellite to your portable receiver through local FM transmitters. The receiver is slightly smaller than a checkbook and features a multiline, alphanumeric, LCD screen, on which quotations are displayed from your own personal portfolio of as many as 72 issues. More than 30,000 stock, option and future prices are available, as is information provided by the Dow Jones News Alert service. QuoTrek service is available in 22 metropolitan areas. The receiver sells for $399, plus the necessary monthly financial subscriptions.

Although the QuoTrek receiver is useful in its ability to obtain the latest financial data, it cannot alert you to important changes in the market if you don't turn it on. The Stock Alert system can. A Stock Alert client does not receive a continuous stream of data, as with a ticker board, but instead receives real-time information about price or volume movement of financial instruments that he has instructed the system to look for. Alerts may include price changes, percent changes and cumulative-volume changes. When your preselected parameters for an item are reached, the computer sends the data to your personal pager. This new service is available in 13 major metropolitan areas and is compatible with any standard numeric pager. Stock Alert is priced at $27.50 per month.

Sports Paging

If you feel more at home in a baseball stadium than on an exchange floor, take a look at the Sports Page--a pocket-sized device that receives information from three sports-ticker services via satellite on its backlit, alphanumeric two-line screen. Reports are updated every five minutes for college/pro basketball and football, baseball, hockey, boxing, horse racing, Las Vegas betting odds, current and future sports schedules, injury information and even weather. A beep indicates when updated data is being sent and the pager features a memory of as many as 80 games that you can call up instantly. Sports Page service is available in 23 metropolitan areas for about $60 per month. Additionally, the $350 pager can serve double-duty as a local alphanumeric pager.

News Anywhere

If Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather leave you flat, the Uniden News-Pager is worth a look. News stories and information from international data bases such as U.P.I, are instantly distributed by satellite to major-metropolitan-area downlink facilities. These facilities then send the information to your personal News-Pager via the VHF, UHF and 900 MHz airwaves. News, sports scores, weather and financial information are displayed on the palm-sized pager's 80-character LCD screen. You can flag certain sporting events and the NewsPager will alert you to a change in the score. The device provides the ability to communicate with a personal computer through its serial interface for the storage of your own personal data such as names, addresses, telephone numbers and schedules. Like the Sports Page, the NewsPager also functions as a local alphanumeric pager. The suggested retail price of the NewsPager is about $420. Rates for news, sports or financial services range from five dollars to $75 per month.

Calls from Aloft

"The captain has informed us that due to unusually heavy airport traffic, our scheduled arrival into the Dallas are a will be delayed by fifty-five minutes." These words are enough to make even the most patient business passenger wince. But there's good news. With an Airfone, you can call ahead to inform your client that you'll be late.

Keeping in touch from 31,000 feet above the continental United States is easy; just insert a major credit card into the Airfone base station, carry the portable handset back to your seat, dial and talk. GTE Airfone service has been reduced in price and is now only two dollars per call and two dollars per minute to locations in the U.S. and Canada and four dollars per call and per minute to international cities.

The Laptop Link

Although devices that provide instant access to stock quotes, sports scores, news, electronic mail and facsimile transmission put the world at your finger tips, used together they will turn your briefcase into the attaché from hell. One viable alternative is to plug into one of the commercial computer-information networks such as CompuServe, which offer these services and much more.

For people on the go, a laptop computer with a modem is a convenient way to gain access to information networks. However, if you are interested in the ultimate in computing portability, a new breed of supersmall "palmtop" computers is the answer.

Companies such as Atari, with its one-pound Portfolio ($399), and Poqet, with its powerful one-pound PC ($1995), have broken the size barrier in personal computing. These small performers can fit inside an interoffice envelope, come with built-in application programs and feature electronic memory cards in place of disk drives. They will also run for as long as 100 hours on two or three AA batteries and have the ability to communicate with any other computer via an external modem.

If you want the ability to telecommunicate from anywhere using your laptop PC, take a look at the Mobile Data Terminal from PowerTek Industries ($2595). This seven-to-nine-pound package is designed for use with Toshiba, Zenith and GRiD laptop PCs and consists of a cellular modem, a three-watt cellular transceiver and a battery pack housed inside a self-contained carrying case that's big enough to hold the laptop as well.

Thanks to satellite technology, people in years to come may be taking international calls on wrist-band phones. Wouldn't General Custer have liked that?

"Services are available that enable you to receive financial quotations on a busy street or by a pool."