Taking a peek at Peek

Michael Gartenberg | July 25, 2008, 06:51 AM

I had dinner last night with Amol Sarva last night, the CEO of Peek, a mobile startup that's taking an approach in the face of conventional wisdom. While everyone is striving to create the next mobile platform, device vendors are trying to add more functions to their gadgets, Peek is going the opposite way. Less is more. Their hardware is probably best described as the original Blackberry for the 21st century. It does email. That's it! No MP3 players, cameras, games, IMs, social network apps or telephony. None of it. It does email. The result is a device that's uber thin (even thinner than the iPhone) with a color screen and a nice qwerty keyboard. Buy one for $99 at Target, take it outside, enter your email address and password. That's it. Peek supports all the major consumer email services such as AOL, Yahoo, Gmail and of course, POP and IMAP (but if you know what IMAP is, this probably isn't the device for you). Peek's using TMobile's network and there's a monthly fee of about $20 for all the email you can, well, mail.

Can it work? Yep. It sure can. We know consumers will carry up to three devices and also know that not everyone wants a super high end phone. Yes, there's a market for advanced telephony devices as Apple has clearly proved but there's other markets as well. Think of the curve of those who said they didn't need a cellphone a decade ago but know wouldn't leave the home without one. Well those same users are starting to get the idea that mobile email might be as good an idea as mobile voice, especially when it's only $99.

It's nice to see a company take a different approach, Amol told me last night how he's getting some pushback. Where's the web browser? What would it take to add to make it a phone? were some of the questions he's been getting. I think this is a case of less is more and it's nice to see someone making a Blackberry... for the rest of us.

Update - it's $20 a month not $200 :)