The Peek – First Impressions

For those of you who don’t know I’m the resident server monkey. What that means is if there is an issue with a server I’m the one who gets the gajillion SMS alerts / e-mails saying that something is awry and you better get up and fix it. As a result I’m a bit of a gadget and communications junkie. I.. like to be in touch and segregate my communications.. some people think it’s a bit much:

1. Skype incoming / outgoing number
2. Personal cell
3. Work cell
4. Google Voice number (goes to all 3)
5. Peek (NEW)

Some people might think this is a bit excessive, and I tend to agree. But when I saw the Peek I thought to myself: “This may be the perfect device for pure Frog Host / Hawk Host E-mail and SMS”. So after Tony shot down the idea as a work expense because I supposedly have enough toys I dropped the $59 for the Pronto + $20 service to give it a whirl. So here’s my initial impressions after owning it for a little over 24 hours.

What Is it?

Well the Peek is essentially a small simple device designed to purely handle e-mail (and optional upgrade to unlimited text messaging). It’s aimed to the e-mail junkie as well as small businesses as an alternative to the phone expensive phone plans.

Look & Feel

When I first opened the packaging I thought it was a nice looking design. It was simple and sleek. The keyboard appeared nicely spaced and the front of it felt like it had a slight rober cover / keypads. After booting it up I had found out that the keyboard was LED backlit with a nice blue color.

Initial Setup

One thing they advertise is how easy it is to setup. When you first turn it on you’re asked to register your e-mail account – it simply asks for your name, e-mail, and password. Now they’ve configured it on their end to properly connect to common mail services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc – I believe if you type in a normal POP or IMAP enabled mail server it will attempt to connect with the credentials provided and let you in – though I did it slightly differently (more on that later).

As an initial test I decided to try my Gmail address.. namely because I’m slightly paranoid and wasn’t sure how they tried to connect to the mail server.. POP? IMAP? SSL/TLS? Normal? After entering my Gmail information it started downloading my e-mails and I could send / receive e-mails from my Gmail account. Pretty neat – the UI is pretty simple and intuitive. There is an occasional sluggishness - but for an entry cost of $59 for the expensive version and $20 for the cheaper version you can’t really complain.

Now after that I dug around in their settings (which has very few options) to see if I could modify how it connects to the mail server / tweak the ports and so forth. To my dismay there was nothing of that nature available. After digging around their forums and support for awhile I bit the bullet and decided to make a post on their forums.

My Accidental Encounter With Support

I posted on their forums asking if I could get more information on how it’s connecting to the mail servers / what is it defaulting to. To my surprise a few minutes after posting a staff member replied asking what e-mail provider I was using. After explaining I run my own mail servers and wanted to use SSL/TLS he gave me his e-mail and said he could tweak the settings so they could use what I wanted.

After sending an e-mail explaining the settings I need for my work e-mails he replied back within a few minutes double checking the MX records he was about to add on their end. There was a small issue so I clarified it with him and he then replied back a few minutes later telling me to add the accounts in question to verify they worked. I did so and to my joy they worked accordingly.

I soon noticed e-mails were coming in somewhat slowly, so I e-mailed the same suppose technician asking how it’s done on their end. He replied back saying that by default it pulls e-mails via IMAP every couple of minutes or if my mail servers suppported IMAP IDLE he could set me up for that. Since our servers do support IMAP IDLE I had him set that up and within a few minutes I had push e-mail to my Peek.

Now I admit I haven’t verified that they are indeed connecting with the settings I provided – but due to how we’re setup internally it wouldn’t have gotten this for without modifying the MX records manually – so I’m fairly confident .

I was soon disappointed to find out that it does’t currently sync with your IMAP server – this is a bit of a turn off due to the large amount of e-mails we receive and it’s quite a handy feature to have to avoid reading the same e-mails over and over.

Text Messaging

I of course was interested on how text messaging worked with the device since I ponied up the extra $40 purely for that functionality. To send a text message you simply type the 10 digit phone number and send the message. To my dismay it sends it from a phone number located in California.. it appears to use the same one each time, though I highly doubt this number is unique to you. When the person replies back it pipes it back to your Peek device. I haven’t dug into how the text messaging functions quite yet, though it appears to “get the job done”. What I’m concerned about is if I’ll have issues using it as a means of notifications for servers and alerts (which if I can’t is going to be a real killer for me).

Conclusion

If you’re running a small business and e-mail is crucial but you really don’t want to pony up for a smart phone / keep your business separate I would recommend the Peek. The price is decent, though the monthly subscription is a bit steep for what it offers. I intend on keeping it for a few months to see how much I actually utilize it – thus far it’s been a handy tool, though we’ll see once I fully integrate it into all of my things. The support was a nice touch – I honestly was horribly disappointed when I learned I couldn’t tweak the settings to use SSL/TLS but was alleviated to learn they could tweak it for you.

If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask .