Pocket Cellular Phone and Pager Hybridized : Technology: Bidding for a slice of a growing market, an Anaheim firm joins devices in a 13-ounce package.

For the busy professional on the run, carrying a pocket-size cellular phone can be both a blessing and a curse. Despite its obvious conveniences, a portable cellular phone can also be a nuisance when it rings during an intimate dinner at a fancy restaurant or while you’re negotiating a sharp curve on a winding highway.

For one in five cellular users, the solution has been to carry both a cellular phone and a pager. The pager allows someone to check the phone numbers of those who call and decide which calls they want to return.

Now an Anaheim company says it has developed a device that combines a pager and cellular phone in a single package. It plans to market its PagerPhone as a gadget for business professionals who want to guard their privacy.

Hoping to claim a piece of a fast-growing pocket phone market, Universal Cellular Inc., a start-up cellular equipment company, plans to unveil the PagerPhone at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.

The 13-ounce PagerPhone will sell for $1,895 when it hits the market at the end of March, said James Wohl, chief executive of Universal Cellular.

But first, the product must complete testing and be approved by the Federal Communications Commission. The company has applied for patent protection on the technology.

Some industry analysts say the product is innovative enough to find a place in the $4-billion cellular phone market, of which pocket phones make up a small portion.

“When you have a cellular phone, it’s an intrusion when you get a call at an inconvenient time,” said Herschel Shosteck, a market researcher in Silver Spring, Md. “This phone takes care of that problem, so it has a niche that should stand apart from a lot of other pocket phone products. They have a substantial advantage.”

Universal Cellular plans to assemble its phones in California from parts made by an unidentified Japanese cellular phone company. The Japanese partner will also market the phone in Asia, Wohl said.

One advantage to the product, Wohl said, is that it solves the problem of interference between the cellular signal and pager signal, which are routed through a single microchip programmed to interpret both signals simultaneously. That problem has been a major obstacle to combining the two devices in a tiny package.

Founded in early 1989 to develop the PagerPhone, Universal Cellular is a privately held company with 25 employees. Wohl is a cable television industry veteran who has published adventure and detective novels under the name James Coltrain.

Michael Brown, senior vice president at the Los Angeles investment firm Sutro & Co. and a director of the Anaheim firm, said the company’s technology and the reputation of its venture capital investors attracted him to the company. Neither he nor Universal Cellular officials would identify those investors.

Universal Cellular, which hopes to market other wireless phone products in the future, plans to launch the PagerPhone with a $5-million national advertising campaign.

Shosteck, the market researcher, said the small company has a chance to secure a place in the high-end pocket phone business. Its success will depend on the quality of its product and the type of competing technologies that emerge.

Shosteck said he expects Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola Inc., for one, to develop competing products.

Nevertheless, he estimates that Universal Cellular could attract 2% to 3% of the cellular subscriber market, which currently totals 5.9 million users. Sales of 25,000 units during the next year are “a reasonable expectation” for the Anaheim firm, he said.

Susan Curtis, publisher of Mobile Office magazine in Woodland Hills, described the Universal technology as “very exciting.”

“I think other cellular companies have blinders on and think that cellular phones are the only way to stay in touch on the road,” she said. “They don’t seem to understand that the technologies can work so well together. The pager can be reached in places where cellular phones don’t work.”

A Motorola spokesman declined comment on new products except to say that “Motorola is not asleep.”

Motorola launched the pocket phone market with its MicroTAC product in April, 1989.