A Peek at Peek for handheld email – Will it work for blogging too?

Image by kukkurovaca via Flickr

One of the most useful things about blogs is that searching blogs is a quick and easy way to see what individuals are saying about a place or thing.  If I want to find a review of a local restaurant – I will often do a search of blogs to see if anyone has posted about their experiece there.  (Another great site to check for first person reviews is Yelp.)

I have had my Blackberry pearl for just about a year.  It does a pretty good job of email, digital camera and phone.  I was just talking to some one else about upgrading to a blackberry and I suggested they keep their phone and get a separate Blackberry.  The Blackberry is good for keeping an eye on my email while I am away from my computer and allows me to leave my laptop at home many afternoons.  But it doesn’t really help in processing email – I do read and delete junk mail while riding the bus or standing in line.  I was thinking that there are times when I just need a phone, and it would be good to leave the email at home.  Yes this means carrying and remembering to charge two different handhelds but maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

As I was strolling through Target on Saturday I stumbled upon a display for Peek.  It is a device the size of Blackberry that for $20/month just does email – almost exactly what I was thinking about because I am not sure if you can even get a Blackberry with out a phone plan anymore.  The price seemed pretty good too.  The Peek costs $99 and some colors were on sale for $79.  The product is so new the sales people didn’t know much about it – and the product literature was lacking answers to some key questions – does it run on a cellular network or just on wifi?

So i grabbed the brochure and the next step is to see what the bloggers have to say.  I entered the url for Peek in the Google blog search page to see what others were saying.

A quick look at the blog posts on Peek and I learned that Peek is one of Time.com’s best gadgets of the year.  Thkgrl’s review is one of the first I found and very helpful – she is also a smartphone user and offers a quick comparison and a video.

But here is the post I have been looking for – Peek and Mobile blogging – the blog Irregular Times has a post on using their Peek to write blog posts.  Yes, you can use the Peek for mobile blogging but there are some limitations.

Another think I learned from the blog posts on Peek is that the Peek people are pretty responsive.  One comment on Engaget linked to the Peek Facebook page.  There is even a Peek filckr group for sharing pictures of the device.  After consulting the bloggers on this one I think that i have a better understanding of the limitations of the device but that I think it is worth a test drive.  The only think I need to figure out is if I get a new cell phone can I still use the camera on that for posting pictures to my blog?

And Peek has a blog - Peek Speaks – which is very well done for a company blog.

Peek Giveaways - I also found some bloggers that are giving away a Peek.  In most cases you just have to leave a comment.

• The Dirty Shirt – Peek Review and Giveaway
• Superdumb Supervillain
• mod*mom
• Peek Forums