Power Failures Can Turn Your Smart Phone into a Paperweight
Many of the recent natural disasters that the U.S. has experienced have resulted in wide spread power failures, making it difficult or impossible to recharge a smart or cell phone. Some of these outages have lasted for several days. Even after power is restored, extensive use of a cell app will cause extreme battery depletion, and it’s just not practical to have a smart or cell phone tethered to a charger on a regular basis during emergency situations.
The battery life for most response paging system devices is generally 3 to 4 weeks and they are easily replaced. Even when using WiFi and Bluetooth enabled cell phones for redundancy, these technologies drain the phones’ batteries, significantly reducing battery life. And, if you fail to enable those features, you may not receive your critical messages at all — even when the cellular system is working perfectly outside the building.
Some smart and cell phone networks do allow a device to receive a text message while being used in the voice or phone call mode. It’s not an option for a first responder or a healthcare provider to miss a critical life or death message, because they took a phone call. Also, if you upgrade your smart phone software, some critical messaging apps may not continue to work as they previously did. A final consideration — many smartphones are also subject to malware and virus attacks. A drawback that is unacceptable in a critical alert messaging situation.