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Every now and then someone will ask me if I want to review a product that really interests me. The Peek was one of those products, because I was interested in seeing if it would be a good replacement for my son’s texting package.

Basically a Peek is a little device about the size of a cell phone that you can use to send emails and text messages. You pay $19.95 per month for unlimited email and texting, which sounded darn good to me since right now my son pays $20 per month for 5000 texts from Verizon.

So the Peek arrived for its test run, and both my son and I checked it out. It uses an existing email service, so we set it up to use my son’s Gmail account. There was a little tutorial available that quickly explained how to use it, so we did that and were off and running in just a couple of minutes. I sent a few emails with it and had no problems. It was very easy to use.

Since I’m not a big texter, my son took care of that part of the review. Here are his (slightly edited) comments:

Texting

• To T-Mobile, messages are sent as a picture message to their phone which my friend had issues with although I got our very brief conversation just fine.
• To Alltel the messages were sent in email format and we had absolutely no problem texting.
• To Verizon texting was quite good and fast.
• To AT&T the texts were not received, at least by my Mom’s iPhone. [Edited to add that this was probably due to the issues with my iPhone though. We tried another text later and I received that. It arrived as a text but looked like an email.]

Emails

• The Peek is useful for sending emails, which is its main purpose. So far I’ve had sporadic email updates which is a little annoying if you’re waiting for a text or email.
• Sending emails to Gmail was nearly instantaneous, although again the reply was a little slow.
• Writing overall was decent, but the buttons were a little small. If you type quite quickly as I’m used to doing [he types at lightning speed] the buttons occasionally skipped a letter or two but it wasn’t hard to go back and change it.
• The scroll wheel on the side was less than helpful, when writing a long message [like this one, which he wrote using the Peek] it was annoying to scroll back and change something quickly because the scroll wheel doesn’t go back one letter (or up/down) per turn on the wheel if you turn it quickly but when going a moderate speed it went back quite well.

My only real complaints were about the speed of things, like typing scrolling and receiving messages. But overall it’s a good product in my eyes.

And my feedback? My son certainly used it to send plenty of emails, even when he was sitting at home and his computer was just turned off. He also used it to check emails regularly. I think it would be great for someone who is interested in a replacement for email only, especially if you did a lot of traveling and didn’t want to have to mess with getting internet connectivity. It looks like it has pretty wide coverage, which would be good.

I’d really hoped that it would be viable as a replacement for my son’s text messaging plan, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite there yet. It worked the best when texting to people who had Verizon, which doesn’t help in our case since my son’s cell is with Verizon and Verizon-to-Verizon texts are already free with his plan. So, I think the device might save people money who mainly use their cell phone plans to check email, but in our case it’s not quite what we needed.