Last Friday I went to pick up a Peek to check it out personally, as well as evaluate its potential as a Christmas gift. I have been playing with it for a couple of days now and wanted to post my likes and dislikes of the device.
With the price tag at or around $99 you shouldn't expect a top of the line piece of hardware. On the other hand you should expect something that is going to last the abuse most mobile devices face throughout their life. Overall the Peek seems to be pretty well built for its price range but I do want to point out some possible issues a user may face.
The biggest concern is the rubber on the front of the Peek. The corners feel as if they could easily start to come up and eventually get caught in your pocket and rip off. This may take some time to do but I can almost guarantee you it will happen down the road. I'm not sure why they chose to go with the rubber front. I could understand possibly just the keyboard section but not the entire front.
The feel of the device is slim and comfortable to use. If you have ever used an older Blackberry you will easily be able to move around on the Peek. The scroll is a bit slow but very usable. To select items you need to press the scroll in which is a bit hard to push. I'm hoping that by using the device daily the click will become much softer feeling. In its current state it actually leaves imprints of the wheel on your finger tip.
The selling point of almost any full QWERTY device is the keyboard. I'm sad to say that this is not one of the better keyboards I have worked with. To test the keyboard I sent 10 emails, 4 sentences or longer, along with a couple of text messages (more on this in a bit). If I had to use one word to describe the keyboard that word would be tiring. After typing those emails I found my fingers very tired. This is mainly because you have to press too hard on these rubber keys to get feedback. The worst key out of all of them is the space bar. It feels as if it is actually two buttons wrapped in one piece of rubber emulating a single wider button. If you press in the middle of this wider button more often than not you will get no response. If you are a quick typist on mobile devices with full QWERTY I think you will find your speed drastically slower on this device. For their market I don't think this will be huge problem. For people that are spoiled and used to Blackberry and possible the N810 you will find typing on this device very tedious.
To prove my point I handed the Peek to my wife whom could care less about mobile devices. I asked her to type up an email and send it. After a couple of minutes I asked her how she liked the feel of the device. Her first words were, "It was hard to press the keys". I think this says it all about the keyboard.
If you can get over the flaws with the keyboard the user interface is actually pretty good. You may find yourself asking can it do this and can it do that? More than likely the answer will always be no. The point being this device does exactly what it says it does. It sends and receives email in a timely manner. If you are a person that must know the instant an email touches your server then this device is not for you. For those of you, like me, that have learned you don't have to answer emails the second they come in it works perfectly. I was able to send and receive emails with ease after a painless setup. If you have your own domain hosted you will have to give the friendly folks at Peek a call. My experience with support was outstanding. That alone is worth staying with this startup in this day and age. Has anybody ever tried to resolve something with Sprint? Wow.
Let us move on to text messages. This is an area that I felt was a bit cumbersome and barely works. I was able to send and receive txt messages from my peek to my cell phone but actually using the feature was a pain. How many of you actually type in the full phone number of everybody you are texting each time? The trick is to send the text and then modify the contact that is automatically added to your contacts. Change the email address as the fully qualified messaging service. For example 15555555@txt.att.net. Either way it’s too difficult for something this easy.
Regardless of what seems like a pretty harsh review of the Peek I would recommend it to a friend that needs a very simple device to send and receive emails. While the texting needs a lot of work I feel that this will come as the device matures. The biggest thing is the keyboard. Please oh please upgrade the keyboard on these devices.
Pics and video will come soon.
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