A small portable computing device (110), such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), is provided with a paging capability to assist the user of the PDA in receiving and responding to pages. One feature is the automated look-up of a telephone number received as a paged message to provide the user of the PDA with the name of the sender of the page, the telephone number of the sender and a telephone icon which, when selected by the user, will cause the PDA to dial the telephone number identified by the paging message. The device is also capable of receiving messages in a predetermined format which identifies the name of the caller as well as an alphanumeric message The paging mechanism is also used to notify the user of electronic mail which has arrived into the user's mailbox located on an electronic mail system. In addition, when the device is in a powered down state, the pager card, upon receipt of a paging message that electronic mail has been sent to the user, wakes up the powered down computing device. The computing device responds by dialling up the electronic mail provider and retrieving the electronic mail message. In addition, an innovative memory allocation technique is used.