GADGET GIDDY: THE TYPICAL FAMILY SPENDS $595 A YEAR ON INTERNET ACCESS AND CELLULAR SERVICES

Don Hinkebein stays in constant communication with his office and his family by way of an alpha-numeric pager, voice mail on his cellular phone and an answering service.

His phone calls at home are forwarded to his cell phone and voice mail from work often get sent to his pager as well. That's why his daughter, on vacation with the family in Naples, Fla., can get a phone call from a friend in Cape Girardeau.

But staying in touch is part of the job for Hinkebein, operations manager for Johnson Communications in Cape Girardeau.

Yet he isn't alone. For millions of people, the art of staying in touch and going about their daily business would seem all but impossible without wireless telephones and other electronic gizmos that started gaining popularity in the mid-1990s.

This year, the typical family will spend $595 on communications services -- to surf the Internet, use a wireless phone or page someone -- up from $175 in 1995, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, an industry trade group.

These modern inventions have created an entirely new category of monthly communications spending -- a far cry from the days when people just dropped a check in the mail to pay for the phone, and maybe cable television.

Hinkebein said he's seen cellular bills run into the $1,000 price range but the average bill is between $45 and $55 per month.

People who opt to use paging services instead of cellular phones can reduce those costs tremendously. The average paging service bill is only $10 or $15 per month.

"Lots of times it's an issue of economics," Hinkebein said. Even with the jump in the cellular market, pagers are still popular.

Today's pagers have come a long way from the one-way beepers of the early 1980s, when only doctors and lawyers carried them. Alpha-numeric and two-way paging today let people receive and send text messages with miniature keyboards or through e-mail access.

Many times knowing what the message actually is, is better than just getting a call-back number, Hinkebein said.

One-way pagers are still fairly common around Southeast Missouri Hospital, where the devices are used by 50 to 100 employees.

Using pagers is a more effective way to stay in touch with the staff who aren't always at their office but out in the hospital, said Chuck Keppler, human resources director at Southeast Missouri Hospital.

While the convenience of a pager is a great selling point to customers, Michael Powell, who guides telecommunications policy as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, questions how much people can afford to spend on electronic gadgetry.

Powell uses a BlackBerry e-mail-capable pager, three cell phones and a Palm Pilot. At home with his wife and their two sons, he has two computers, two phone lines and a fax machine.

"It's a big chunk of my budget," Powell told The Associated Press.

Some 118 million Americans have wireless phones -- nearly four times the number in December 1995, according to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association, an industry trade group.

More than half, or 54 percent, of the 105 million U.S. households have at least one cell phone, according to Forrester Research, a technology research firm in Cambridge, Mass.

One in 10 households has a pager; 6 percent use a Palm Pilot.

"This is ballooning into two, three-hundred dollar communications bills," Powell remarked.

Such costs are certain to climb as the technology is put to new uses.

For example, families moving into 18 houses being built in the Seattle suburb of Renton can look forward to controlling any device, appliance or system in their homes using the TV remote control, mobile phone, personal digital assistant or some other wireless device.

Not everyone sees the need to load up life with technology.

Krystal Williams, who heads to business school at Dartmouth College in the fall, said she recently canceled her cell phone because she didn't use it enough to justify the cost.

But she has a computer at home and wants to get a laptop for school. She also won a Palm Pilot during orientation for business school, but hasn't powered it up yet.

"I think my world will get increasingly high-tech when I start business school, but right now I just can't afford some stuff," said Williams, 27, of Chapel Hill, N.C.

Two years with the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republican taught her that she can live without any of the gadgets.

"People have things because we like to appear we're important," Williams said.

Features editor Laura Johnston contributed to this story.