The recipient could then click on one of the boxes, and the pager would send the information back to the person who asked the question. That's why so many people still carry both a pager and a phone. Failures like SkyTel's have given convergence a dodgy reputation in some quarters. IBM bought Rolm, a maker of switches, for the same reason. The idea made some sense.
Switches are, after all, just specialized computers.
And IBM meekly sold off Rolm. For the foreseeable future, the benefits of convergence will more likely be a device costing hundreds of dollars rather than millions. It will take a little weight out of your briefcase or pockets and give you one less thing to misplace. Because Seiko's Message Watch is the size of a normal digital watch, the display is fairly small, but the watch can receive e-mail messages, stock prices, sports sources, and so on. If the motto of the digital age is that you can't be too smart or too thin, then the latest Personal Digital Assistant is a real move forward.