Battery life

Mail delivery seems fine lately. Unless I notice some slowdowns that persist more than over the course of a few hours, I think that’s all I have to say on that.

Now for battery life. The battery does not quite last 4 or 5 days between charges, but more like 3 or 4, depending on how often you use it to send or receive mail. What’s very nice about the Peek is that you can have it running while charging, and charging doesn’t take long anyhow — 90 minutes or less. I’ve noticed that the battery life indicator seems to jump the gun a bit — it turns orange well before you’re anywhere near to running out — and you’ll see that if you switch it on and off it goes back to green.

Mail delay

I guess I spoke too soon; there seems to be a major mail delay this evening. Several scheduled mails have not been delivered for at least an hour. Nothing on the Peek website about a delay.

A week with a Peek

It’s been a little over a week since my Peek arrived – weird, because it feels like I’ve had it for much longer. I’m enjoying it and it’s doing exactly what I wanted it to do for me: forward my work e-mails to me so I can keep tabs on what’s going on when I’m in transit (at a red light – I don’t text while driving, and neither should you!!) or out and about on the weekend. The e-mail arrival times vary, but I’m not noticing a significant slowing trend — which was something I was afraid of, but seems an unwarranted worry.

It’s also proven to be a nifty notetaker – but I have small fingers and nice fingernails to really zip through that ram-tough keyboard.

Some scattered thoughts:

–One bit of added functionality I’d really like is the ability to read Word documents, even just in plain text form. I get forwarded Word documents a lot and would like to see if they’re important enough for me to drop what I’m doing and head home to take care of… If they can show JPGs, surely Word docs aren’t too much to ask.

–Also, the option to break large incoming emails into segments. I don’t know if Peek’s mail servers can really do that, but “Too long for Peek! Read it online!” is a little disappointing (even though I knew there was a length limit).

–A decent complete online manual, please. This gadget can do more than what’s in the quick start guide, but you’d never know it.

–I’m wondering if Peek could be marketed as a low-cost mobile communications device for the deaf. It seems to me that deaf users would have little use for smartphones with pricey mandatory voice plans or fancy ringtones, but would find mobile e-mail or messaging to be just as vital as the rest of us do.

By the way, the best solution for grabbing online content through your e-mail is SnapAsk. Their e-mails are prompt and clean, especially the “Wiki request” function.

Another neat service is TweetBeep, which bundles the latest Twitter tweets on subjects of your choosing, and delivers them in a digest e-mail to your box about once an hour.

Gotta go. The boss just sent me another after-hours e-mail. Thanks to Peek, I can figure out whether or not it’s really important, without having to sell my soul to a phone company.

Ease of use

My dad (69 years old and fairly tech savvy, but by no means a gear-head) had heard I was trying a Peek, and when I met him for lunch today, he was interested to see how it worked. I simply handed it to him and, saying nothing, let him figure it out for himself. He did — in about 30 seconds. It’s that intuitive. If the Peek has its natural limitations or any rough edges, its design is absolutely fantastic.

He uses a Samsung flip phone with web and (supposedly) e-mail capability, although for some reason his web browser can’t access his Gmail account any more. In order to find out why, he’s got to plow through Verizon customer service – something he’s been putting off, because he hasn’t got the time. “Could this thing check my Gmail?” he wondered. “Sure,” I told him, “I can just register your e-mail as my third user account.” We didn’t do that, but it just underscores the appeal of having a Peek around.

While we were talking, he noted that his Samsung phone had started heating up again. The battery gets hot after going on the Internet for a while. I had my Peek on almost continuously for the last 3 days, with no heat coming from it at all. I have a feeling the Peek is not an explosion hazard…

Other places to read and talk about the Peek

As listed on the official Peek blog, here are some other folks with blogs and forums about the Peek… check them out!

Geeky Peek

Le Journal de Peek

Peek eMail Blog

PeekUser.com

Mail times, part 2

Noted two 13-minute delays on e-mails this evening… again, hope this isn’t a trend due to more people using the system. The delivery times seem to be lengthening. My own delivery-time needs aren’t critical, but if it gets to be much longer than 15-20 minutes I’m going to have to rethink my commitment to the service. Of course, if this was a phone service with a contract, they’d pretty much have me by the figurative ‘nads… without a contract, you can always vote with your feet! So that’s one motivation for Peek to continuously improve delivery times on their lovely device — motivation that the phone companies probably don’t feel.

The Peek folks seem really responsive and engaged, so hopefully they’ll take this observation as constructive criticism.

Updated: Amol from Peek has responded to my concerns with some detailed information. Read the “Comments” to this post.

More books by e-mail

Another service of interest to Peekers: DearReader.com, which will send you free excerpts of books that are currently in print. Of less interest than something like Daily Lit, but kinda neat.

Posted by email from twentyfour01’s posterous

Poetry by Peek

Daily Lit is a great site that delivers installments of both modern and classic works of literature (the classic books are free; a small fee is charged for modern books) to your e-mail box.  Naturally, this is a great application for Peek users — especially since you can tell Daily Lit to send you your daily installments at the same time every day.  For instance, I’ve signed up for the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson to be delivered to my Peek every evening at 10:30 (bedtime for me).  I can enjoy her glorious genius every night without facing the distractions of sitting at my computer desk or being tempted to surf the web on my laptop, rather than just having a quiet poetry moment before lights out.   It’s Peek meets Kindle.

This gets to the heart of why anyone would want a Peek device in the age of the do-it-all, information-laden smartphone.  Smartphones have their place, but sometimes it’s hard to put them in their place.   Technology has so much enrichment to offer us, but sometimes it’s running our lives and filling up our complete attentions, instead of working for us and letting us properly focus our attention on what we want to focus on.  Peek doesn’t get in the way of the good things the Internet has to offer.

(Daily Lit needs to send you a confirmation link whenever you sign up for a book, so you’ll need to log into your web Gmail account to activate it.   You can also send e-mail to support@dailylit.com if you have problems doing that.)

Moblogging with Posterous

Something that some people are going to want to do with the Peek is to use it as a moblogging tool. While some services like Blogger have a native post-by-email capability, unfortunately WordPress doesn’t really have one that works very reliably. One solution is Posterous, a service that can post to WordPress blogs (and Livejournal, Xanga, Blogger and others) via mail. (It can also post via e-mail to Twitter, similar to Twittermail.

The drawback to services like Posterous and Twittermail is that they require you to give them the password to your blog. You might not want to do that for security reasons, especially if it’s your administrative user account. One solution is to create a non-admin user for your blog and give that login/password to the Posterous service. That way you can hopefully avoid any serious security problems.

Sending and receiving times

I’ve been fairly impressed with the send and receive times with the Peek so far, although I do wish they could be faster. Sending appears to be almost instantaneous. When I first got it on Tuesday, mails took about 3 to 7 minutes to arrive. However, today (Thursday), I didn’t receive an e-mail after 11 minutes, and then only when I scrolled down to “Send/Receive” and pushed a request to the server. I really hope this is not indicative of what send times will be like as more people start using the service. They’ll need to work on that.

PS: A second test had a 6-minute arrival time, which seems within the norm I had experienced thus far. Maybe the 11-minute one was just a busy moment.