The Peek just got a whole lot more useful. The little email-only device is simple in both form and function, and despite only scoring 5 out of 10 in our Gadget Lab review, got this endorsement from Wired.com copy chief Tony Long:
If you’re a Luddite at heart but still have reason to fiddle with e-mail from time to time, or if you believe that simplicity in all things is the key to life, the Peek is for you.
The simplicity is the appeal, but a new service update has added support for text messages and pictures (jpegs already worked, but now you get almost all image types). Both of these are well within the spirit of email, and the SMS function would probably have made me buy this back when I was trying live without a cellphone.
Messages are sent by adding an @cell.getpeek.net suffix to the phone number, and then sending them like normal emails. The Peek people warn that this is a strictly alpha service right now, but certainly a welcome addition. Better still, the Peek can now be had for just $80
Of Upgrades & Attachments [Geeky Peek via JK on the Run via Brownlee]
Text messaging on a Peek – really! [Peek]
Product page [Peek]]
See Also:
HP’s Pavilion-alike Touchsmart tx2z has been thoroughly groped by Laptop Mag, with the sticky-fingered results (above) posted for our voyeuristic pleasure. The $1300 tx2z is HP’s first consumer level tablet notebook and features an AMD Turion X2 processor (hence the name) and a variety of custom finishes.
But the important part is the screen, a 12″ capacitive swiveller. The capacitive screen, like that of the iPhone, allows multi touch gestures, and the swivelling hinge means that those gestures might actually be useful as you don’t need to hold your arms out straight to use it.
So, how does it fare? According to reviewer Joanna Stern, the touch works great, but is still limited by drivers. The advantage of the iPhone is that it was conceived from the beginning to be controlled by touching the screen. Any PC maker needs to hack together custom controls for any existing applications that aren’t built with touch support. So, swiping up and down works fine for scrolling web pages (despite a spotty Wi-Fi connection), and “double tapping the screen and then drawing the letter M, brings up the multimedia touch panel”.
The conclusion? Promising, but flawed. There’s one oddity to Sterns’ review which makes us think that the Laptop Mag folks have access to some secret, thought control tech:
Since the debut of the Apple iPhone, people want to use their fingers to control their technology
Just what have they been using up ’til now, Joanna?
Hands-On With the HP TouchSmart tx2z [Laptop Mag. thanks, Avram!]
The developers on the Gmail team add a new feature to Gmail Labs: a forgotten attachment detector. With the experimental feature enabled, if you mention an attachment in your email and hit send without actually attaching a file, you’ll get a pop-up message asking if you meant to send without the file. This new feature supplants the Attachment Reminder script in Better Gmail, though the words the reminder used as triggers were configurable, and these are not. (In fact, I haven’t tested the Gmail Labs version in languages other than English.) My initial test show that it works sometimes—an attachment-free message that read “File’s attached!” didn’t trigger a confirmation dialog, but the words “See attached file” did. The Gmail Labs developers are busy these days, with this following on the heels of a half dozen others in the past week.
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The Peek just got a whole lot more useful. The little email-only device is simple in both form and function, and despite only scoring 5 out of 10 in our Gadget Lab review, got this endorsement from Wired.com copy chief Tony Long: