Synapse Pager Card

The Synapse Pager Card^TM, offered by PageMart Wireless ^TM, is a replacement memory card that fits inside the PalmPilot^TM organizer; the card adds paging capabilities to the PalmPilot. The Synapse Pager Card is capable of upgrading all Pilot, PalmPilot and IBM WorkPad^TM models. It includes 2 MB of RAM as well as the new Palm OS^TM 3.0 operating system with the paging application in flash memory. One of the features of the Pager Card includes integration of paging with the address book application on the PalmPilot; this enables numeric pages to be matched with phone numbers that users have listed in their address book. Additionally, the Pager Card integrates with the date book application. A schedule change can be sent via the paging network in a vCalendar^TM format, and the Pager Card application will recognize the message as a schedule change and can add it to the date book automatically. This article describes the software architecture of the Synapse Pager Card, as well as the challenges that the software development team (The Windward and Motorola) Group encountered while developing the software for the PalmPilot