Paging subscriber devices leverage multiple technologies to achieve low power and long battery life: semiconductors, circuits, systems architecture and network protocol. While many types of electronic devices have capitalized on low-power features for several of these technologies, few other than personal paging services have taken advantage of opportunities presented by well designed protocols with explicit power-reduction features. This paper will review the state-of-practice in existing paging services, and discuss the relevance of such techniques to other wireless communication systems.