Comments on: From Peek’s inbox

By: Spike

Spike — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:28:13 +0000

I plan on using my Peek to replace about 80% of my phone usage. Most wireless providers are able to deliver email to their customer’s phones as SMS. And wireless customers, such as my wife on Verizon, can reply to an emailed SMS message and… alas, it returns to the sender’s email client! I feel that if this information were publicized on your site, it would provide a very compelling incentive. People will say:

“You mean I can send an email to a cell phone! And get a reply! Awesome!!”

Regards, Spike

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:54:58 +0000

Rob & Marvin -

Appreciate the support - hope you pick a Peek up on September 15th when they go on sale at Target and http://www.getpeek.com!

- Jeremy
Peek Marketing

By: Marvin

Marvin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:09:22 +0000

Can’t wait to get my Peek unit.

It makes all the sense in the world…………..

By: Rob Beschizza

Rob Beschizza — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:30:38 +0000

Against-the-grain ideas are gold dust, even if implementation is where battles are really won. I think the internet might go knock-kneed if you offered an SDK: the device’s hardware limitations will be liberating, not constraining.

By: Brian Mastenbrook

Brian Mastenbrook — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:50:14 +0000

Hi Jeremy,

Rather than building something like an SSH client into the device, why not put a J2ME runtime on the device so that multiple different types of programs can be run? There are open-source VMs out there that I’m sure could be adapted, and it would make it much easier to add many different types of applications.

Of course, if J2ME isn’t up your alley, Adobe has done some very interesting work with getting arbitrary C applications to run on the Flash VM via LLVM. You could use a similar approach to build a lightweight VM and allow almost any application to be ported and run at near-native speed while retaining the security and stability advantages of a virtual machine. (Think of it as the iPhone SDK without the application stability problems and lengthly developer “approval” process.) If this idea interests you and you’d like to discuss further, feel free to shoot me an email.

On another note - I was commenter #5 on the survey contest on Gizmodo: http://gizmodo.com/5039699/peek-handheld-no-phone-no-frills-just-email#c7383321 . I see one of the comments from my email above, but I never got a reply…

- Brian Mastenbrook

By: CL

CL — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 09:02:48 +0000

Any plans to roll this out in Australia?

By: jeremy

jeremy — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:27:28 +0000

Chris - very, very interesting idea on the SSH client. We’re keeping a list here at Peek for future product enhancements and I’ve added your idea to it. Thanks for checking us out!

- Jeremy
Peek Marketing

By: Chris Allegretta

Chris Allegretta — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 20:40:38 +0000

I agree with the premise that there is such a thing as too many features. Phones are often unnecessarily complicated.

It may not be your intended audience here, but there is a market for sysadmins who dont like talking on the phone and would prefer to communicate via email. That said, they need to be able to log in and troubleshoot issues as well, and they would prefer not to have to pull out the laptop for it, which means an SSH client. Many have turned to blackberries or the iPhone for this, but the keyboards are always sub par.
This device seems to have REAL potential as a portable SSH and email client, as they keyboard looks fantastic.

I know, its another feature, but if you aren’t interested in providing that, why not push out a dev kit so others could do it? Even if unsupported by the companies I think sysadmins would eat this device up. I brought this up with Helio regarding SSH on the Ocean and they basically blew me off; look how that company turned out :/