If you have never heard about it, the Peek is very a simple device dedicated to one thing: email. It’s roughly the size of your average smartphone and comes with a color screen and a qwerty keyboard. That’s it. No fancy features, just basic email access in your pocket.
The Peek comes in two different versions: Peek Pronto and Peek Classic. The Pronto is priced at $59.95, and the Classic at $19.95. However, the phone is not very useful without a plan. The plans starts at (and you know what that really means…) $14.95 per month. For that price, you get unlimited email access nation wide (U.S.) from your Peek.
The problem is this: it doesn’t even beat your iPhone/BlackBerry on the one thing it was created for, namely email. This brings me to the big question: why would you ever get a Peek?
The company is pitching the Peek with the slogan ‘Save $100s over a smartphone. No Contracts, no hidden fees,’ but I really don’t get it. Who is this phone intended for? Assuming you already got a smart-phone, adding an unlimited data plan to your existing plan (but who doesn’t have that already…) roughly runs at the same price of the Peek subscription. Perhaps more importantly, you don’t need to carry around a second device just for email.
Ok, so perhaps the Peek is not intended for the tech-crowd who already got an iPhone/BlackBerry/Droid/[insert-your-favorite-smartphone]. Then who is the intended market? Soccer-moms? Joe the Plumber? Even if they would be a potential customer, as the phone they got for free with their plan can’t do email properly, I doubt that they care enough about email to buy a dedicated device for it. Also, last time I checked, you could even get a BlackBerry for free. Even if you’re not part of the tech-crowd and your work requires you to stay on top of email around the clock, the company you work for is more than likely to hand you a BlackBerry from the very first day.
The bottom line is that I understand why they developed the Peek: they wanted to find a way to combat the outrageous data fees charge by certain phone providers (yes, that’s mostly you AT&T). So they developed an email device that consumes little bandwidth and were therefor able to negotiate a cheap data plan. But a new device is not the solution, it’s merely a dirty quick-fix to the core problem: ridiculous data fees charged by the operators.
Luckily, there are providers who are starting to understand what the customers want. For instance, T-Mobile offers a plan that runs for $79.99 per month and features unlimited talk, text, and data. What’s even more important, it doesn’t require you to sign a 24 month contract. The plan doesn’t come with a ‘free’ phone, but you’d be very naive if you thought the ‘free’ phone was actually free anyways (think of it more like a payment plan built into your contract).
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AT&T has poor cell phone coverage in many parts of the US compared to Verizon (clearly the broadest coverage documented by several consumer publications). Thus for geographically reliable *voice* the best choice is Verizon. The best smartphone user experience for many purposes beyond email is Apple’s iPhone, but the iPhone is only available on AT&T. The compromise is to use Verizon for voice, and something else which is cheap and reliable (at slow data speeds) for basic email, namely, PEEK running on T-Mobile, at least until the 4G LTE iPhone becomes available on Verizon (or until AT&T does a MAJOR upgrade to their cellular coverage).
What stops you from getting an unlocked phone? I ran my iPhone on T-Mobiles network for a long time. Moreover, I’m fairly confident that we will see a lot more unlocked (high-end) devices on the U.S. market in the near future. Perhaps the most recent example is Google’s upcoming Nexus (although details are still vague).
As far as coverage goes, that’s a whole different story. The primary problem with Verizon is that they are using CDMA and most high-end phones are primarily intended for GSM (with Droid being the exception).
Having a second device for just email doesn’t really feel like an appropriate solution to this problem. Instead, let’s hope the providers get their acts together to improve the coverage (or don’t leave the civilization).