[BBLISA] New cell phone recommendation?

[Dave Pascoe]

Sanity check.  Crazy requirement regarding the paging company.  :-)

Verizon supports SMS text messaging - they do not support "traditional"
paging.  In practice, SMS is every bit as reliable as the older paging
systems and works as well as two-way pagers.  She can receive "pages"
via email or via someone leaving her a numeric message.

So...

1) Dial numbers sent to her in pages...check:
Treo and Blackberry both do this.

I use a Treo 650 and I like it.  But it's taken a while to tame it.
Suffers from occasional spontaneous reboots.  Verizon: Treo 700p is nice
but the 755p will be coming soon.  Nicer form factor:
http://www.palminfocenter.com/news/9414/palm-treo-755p-review/

2) The paging company

>The gotcha is that she's working with a very UN-technical paging
>company and we have no idea how the messages will be sent. The phone >
>may think they're "text messages" or "email"...<snip>
>no guarantee of anything except the number to be dialed will
>appear as text on the screen.

You really need to nail down what this means.  The devil's in the
details.  If they can email then you're all set...if you are expecting
the device to work on the paging company's radio/data infrastructure,
then you are in for disappointment.  AFAIK, there is no device that will
do that.  Paging is a slowly dying industry, and I haven't seen any
attempt to integrate with cellular handsets.

Good luck!
Dave