Amol Sarva, maker of Peek, an e-mail only cellular handset, is elatedly pointing to its position as the runaway leader of Time’s ongoing “Gadget of the Year” poll.
This will be a good way to separate one sort of gadget fan from another–I hesitate to reduce it to Nerds vs. Geeks. The former will be affronted by Time’s selection of something aimed at stupids instead of at them, while the latter will think “Cool, has anyone hacked the Peek yet?”
My problem with the peek is pretty straightfoward: they say they’re aiming at people who don’t want to carry around a big clunky smartphone – those people want a phone that’s “just a phone”. But then aren’t these people stucking carrying around a phone AND a big clunky email device? I guess it means that they can choose not to have their email with them… But anybody willing to get this device to have mobile email on the go, will almost certainly want to carry it around with them all the time. So it seems to me like it’s kind of a self defeating gadget.
My problem with the Peek is that the client is slow to delete emails. That one thing hurts it real bad for me, as I get so much quasi-spam from PR people that I don’t want to block, but which mostly gets immediately deleted.
Also, IMAP please!
@1, I know I’d rather have a big clunky email device and a lithe, sexy phone than a bit clunky all-in-one. I’ve never found smartphones to be comfortable to hold up to the head and use as a phone. Also, the phone is more of an urgent thing in my world (pocket) and email takes a lower priority (messenger bag).