I expect to see pagers, communicators, PDAs, and cell phones rolled into one device within the next couple of years. It just makes sense. Three years is probably the extreme range on this prediction.

A large part of the (fixed) cost of any such network is the transmission, retail (or business-oriented) sales infrastructure, and device manufacture and support. The somewhat greater requirements of cell phones are largely offset by efficiencies of scale in all these areas. It's simply cheaper to give the workers the (slightly more full-featured) phones than to give them the (appropriately scaled but hard to support) pagers. And, once the phones are deployed, I'm sure they'll find their uses.