Wednesday, May 27, 2009

My isues with Peek.

For those of you who don't know what a Peek it you can find out here.

I got the Peek because I wanted to connect to my email accounts and replace my cell texting all for the monthly price of $20. At first I liked it. It was new and exciting. I got on the message boards and learned a lot about it and some things it can do. For example I can update my Twitter AND Facebook status at the same time if I send a message to Ping.fm.

Basically, i never sent it in to get the latest firmware update from 1.04 to 1.08. I just didn't want to be without it for a week while it was in New York. I also didn't want to pay for shipping.


Then the outages came. You see, once you set up your accounts in your Peek, Peek Corporate acts as a middleman. They monitor or ping your email accounts (with version 1.04) every 5 minutes, grab the emails and send them to your Peek. Version 1.08 is supposed to have PUSH technology and be much more "instant". Well the servers went down and people weren't getting upset that they weren't getting their info. This is the main, if not only, reason I didn't want to get a Blackberry.

This is the straw the broke the camel's back. I get an email from my wife at 3 pm in my gmail account. Since I'm at my desk all day I read sent email, reply and forget about it. At 4:13 pm my Peek beeps informing me I have new emails. I'll give you ONE guess concerning which emails I get. Gold star for you!! The exact emails I got from my wife over AN HOUR AGO.

Version 1.08, or Pronto as they call it, is supposed to let me see attached jpgs and PDFs and such but is it really worth it?? I don't think so. PLUS, now I have to carry around TWO gadgets instead of a single cell phone. I think I'm gonna sell my Peek on eBay and go back to cell texting.

End of rant.

5 comments:

Elaine said...

Let me know when/if you cancel your Peek service and I'll set you back up for texting on the Verizon.

dkg said...

have you seen this
qwertcorp.com
its the same price as peek but uses sms instead of email. ive gotten used to some of the benefits of having mobile email, but having unreliable service is about as good as no service at all.

cjstuff said...

The Peek is a mobile POP3 device that leaves all mail on server. All the messages you receive on your Peek are, by their nature, completely duplicative of mail messages you may be viewing / have viewed with another e-mail client. It's always been like this, including some degree of lag from when mail appears on your server to when it shows up on your Peek.

I admit that the Peek service issues of the past week (and counting) have been very disappointing. I'm lucky that I don't rely on my Peek for time-sensitive e-mail, so I've been able to ride out the glitches. However, when Verizon tells me that it will take a WEEK for them to fix a dead dial tone on my land line that's entirely caused by a problem in their network (I remember the days when this was a same-day service type of problem), is Peek's low-budget approach to tech support all that different? I'm not thrilled about it, but I'm not thrilled about a lot of things these days.

One final comment. The current version of the Peek OS is 1.09, not 1.08. I'm amazed you ever wanted to use a Peek if you were stuck on 1.04. I wanted to throw mine against the wall until I upgraded it.

AppsByAaron said...

Thanks for the feedback everyone!

Psyop'er said...

Peek service is still spotty at best, even with 1.09.15 ROM version. If you look at the device specs, it looks suspiciously like a sidekick (special services provided on the backend, only 8 megabytes of messages storage, 104 no rich content types permitted, etc.).

I like the concept, but the price should be halved for the quality of infrastructure service being provided (even though tech support folks are great, they can't fix everything).