Technology for Mortals

A product that has caught my eye since last year is the Peek Simply email device from Peek that gives you wireless email and SMS capability.  It’s an inexpensive device that costs $20 for the Classic model and $60 for the “Pronto” model more suitable to business users.  The Classic model gives you access to 2 email accounts and image viewing capability while the Pronto gives you access to 5 email accounts with image, DOC, and PDF viewing capability.

The Pronto also has Exchange compatibility and the email service is supposedly instant “push” email, but I called Peek to confirm that it’s a 90 second delay which probably means that Peek’s servers poll the POP3 or Exchange server every 90 seconds.  As for the Exchange “compatibility”, that’s for the inbox only and it grabs your mail by logging in to your company’s Outlook Web Access (OWA) server.  The sent email goes through Peek’s SMTP server which unfortunately means that mail sent from the Peek Pronto is not synchronized in the Exchange server.  Now if Peek can download email using your OWA account, there’s no reason they can’t send email using your OWA account so this might be something they might fix eventually.  Being able to sync on the inbox and sent folder is an absolute minimum requirement for me.  You can probably forget about any kind of calendaring compatibility and I doubt they download every message in your corporate inbox on your Exchange server.  You’re most likely not going to be able to search through your sent mails either so it effectively treats your Exchange server as a POP3 mail server.

While the screen is fairly large and detailed, you can’t surf the web because there is no web browser.  Besides, you’re only paying $15 to $20 a month (12 month or 1 month term) for the email- and SMS-only wireless service when full service wireless Internet usually costs $60 per month.

$15 per month is pretty cheap so it is an attractive service for people who want mobile email without buying an expensive smart phone and contract.  However, don’t even expect it to offer the same level of functionality as an iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, or Android phone.  It’s definitely good enough for SMS and consumer class email especially if you prefer carrying a plain old dumb phone that doesn’t crash and lasts days instead of hours.