Hasta La Gadget!

Peek Pronto is the faster version of the original Peek, an incredibly stripped down slab of screen and keyboard that does one thing—email—but aims to do it simpler than anyone else.

Hardware
It’s boxy, whimsical minimalism done right. Its unfussy shape and the front’s bubbly keys are friendly and inviting. But its chrome back, and its slimness—thinner than the BlackBerry Curve 8900, the thinnest BlackBerry you can buy—infuse it with the sufficient gadget allure.

The screen is bright—a little dimmer than blinding Curve 8900 screen—and just large and crisp enough to make a text-only device nice to use—a mite higher resolution would always be better, but everything’s clear and readable. The markedly ugly themes are actually the screen’s real undoing.

Whether or not you’ll like the keyboard is largely a matter of taste—I’m usually not fan of chiclet-style keyboards that sacrifice button surface area for spacing between the keys, but even though I don’t particularly like typing on the Peek, my pinpoint accuracy consistently astounds me. I think that this is because the strike point on the keys is deceptively larger than it appears to be, and the way the keys are shaped prevents half-misses from becoming whole misses. They’re are easier to press than on the original Peek—since this is by no means a squishy keyboard, frequent users of the original who didn’t wear iron gauntlets must be afflicted with crippling arthritis by now. The rubber coating is a perfect consistency—not too sticky for your nubs, but you won’t slip off either.

Your primary method of navigation is the scroll wheel, a throwback to the old-school BlackBerry days. Which, in theory is fine, since you’re merely navigating in cardinal directions, not across a plane (like with a trackball) but in practice, I miss the speed of a trackball. Also, considering you have to use it as a button a lot—to bring up the menus that you use to do anything, it’s a bit too thin, making it a harder than necessary target. The back button, which sits just below it, could use some steroids too—obviously, it shouldn’t be too easy to hit, but it should be easier to mash without accidentally hitting the scrollwheel too.

Software and Experience
It’s a simple, minimal experience. I get that. But why does it have to be ugly too? The three color schemes—Slate, Tangerine and Spring are seriously gross. BlackBerry’s latest OS makes a text-oriented screen look pretty snazzy, for the most part—especially in media menus—so I know the Peek guys can do better.

Starting up really is easy: Enter your email account info and name and go. (Yes, you can do multiple, up to five.) And for the people Peek is aimed at, that’s how it should be. When you power up, it takes you directly your inbox. It took a couple minutes before mail started pouring in, but everything flowed in perfectly.

So, the big thing about the Pronto over the past Peek model, as far as the average user is concerned, is that the UI is less sluggish, it uses Push for email, so all of your email arrives automagically, and you get unlimited text messages.

Push indeed seems to works just fine—not much more to say about it than that. Text message implementation is a bit messy—it’s essentially an email converted into a text message, so it’s not a very clean solution, with headers and stuff to wade through on the Peek.

I didn’t spend a whole lot of time with the original Peek, so I can’t say how much faster precisely the Pronto moves—BoingBoing’s Rob and others have complained about its sluggishness—but for the most part, it’s fast enough. Some things are slower than they should be—deleting an email takes about three seconds, though deleting a whole bunch (hold shift and scroll down) takes about four.

While the Pronto adds Exchange support, it still lacks, for instance, IMAP and custom folders. The tricky thing about critiquing something like the Peek, which wears its minimalist monofunctionalism as a badge, is finding the line between missing feature (custom folders) and pointed omission (IMAP?). What exactly should it add? If it keeps adding features, when does it move beyond itself?

Should You Peek?
The Peek Pronto is $80 for the hardware plus $20 a month for the service that rides on T-Mobile’s service. It’s a bit much on the monthly end—$10 would make it immensely more attractive. If you have to ask why you would buy it when you could get a BlackBerry, whose data plan isn’t much more than that, this probably isn’t for you. It doesn’t organize your email (much less your life), browse the web or do anything else but let you—wait for it—peek at your email and execute only the most essential and defining functions of email. It does this pretty well, for the most part.

I can’t imagine someone who really wanted email on the go would want something this simple from the outset. But if I wanted to a ditch a full-featured device to more completely untether myself from the world when I get away from my desk, but can’t give it up completely, Peek would be a solid form of Nicorette. [Peek]

This article was written on February 19, 2008 by CyberNet.

Time Saving Tuesday

One of the reasons that I love Gmail the most is the remarkably powerful filter system that is integrated into it. With the filtering system you can analyze emails as they hit your Inbox, and then perform certain actions on them. If you spend the time to setup quality filters it can almost be like having your own personal secretary to sift through emails, but it’s a lot cheaper.

Google doesn’t limit the amount of filters that you can create in Gmail (although just 20 of your filters can forward emails to another address) so you can go as crazy as you would like. Today we’re going to take a look at some of the various ways that you can put the filters to work for you.

–Using Gmail Filters–

Setting up Gmail filters can be as easy or as hard as you would like. Some filters that I’ve setup are rather simple and are just based upon the from address, while others took a little more thought. Lets start with an overview of how you would setup a filter:

1. Click Create a filter (next to the Search the Web button at the top of any Gmail page).
   
2. Enter your filter criteria in the appropriate field(s).
   
3. Click Test Search to see which messages currently in your account match your filter terms. You can update your criteria and run another test search, or click Next Step.
4. Select one or more actions from the list. These actions will be applied to messages matching your filter criteria in the order in which the actions are listed — for example, you could choose to Forward matching messages to a specific email address, then Delete the messages.
   
5. If you’d like to apply this filter to messages already in your account, select the Also apply filter to x conversations below checkbox.
6. Click Create Filter.

–Tips & Tricks–

Using the filters can be pretty easy, but here are some things that might help you out along your quest for a cleaner Inbox:

• When blocking email addresses in the From field you can keep things a bit more general if you would like by specifying just the domain. For example, if you receive a bunch of messages from Orkut users instead of blocking each individual address just enter *@orkut.com in the From field.
• I’m able to use only one filter for blocking dozens of spam addresses thanks to the OR operator. For example, entering in spamaddress1@junk1.com OR spamaddress2@junk2.com will block emails coming from either of those addresses. There’s no need to create separate filters for each address.
• If you use Google Talk’s chat history feature you’ll soon realize that your conversations are also analyzed against your filters. To exclude chats from a particular filter enter is:chat into the Doesn’t have field. This will ignore all of your Google Talk conversations in the filters.
• You can scan filetypes in an email by putting filename:type in the Has the words field. Just replace “type” with the extension of the file that you want to filter. For example, to filter for Windows Media Player videos you would enter filename:.wmv into the field.
• Gmail supports what’s called “plus addressing” meaning the email address username+blah@gmail.com is still sent to the username@gmail.com email address. When signing up for services use this method so that filtering is even easier. For example, you could use an address username+amazon@gmail.com for all of your Amazon purchases. Then in the To field use the username+amazon@gmail.com to filter the emails sent from them.

–Useful Filters–

To get the ball rolling I thought I would list out some of the ways that I’ve put the filters to work:

• Anti-phishing – I use the plus addressing technique that I mentioned above for all of my financial accounts. Then when the emails come in I check the To address to see if it is from someone like eBay. If it is I’ll apply a “Financial” label to it. This coincidentally happens to serve as an anti-phishing mechanism as well, because if you think about it almost no scam artists are going to guess the “plus addresses” that I’ve created. When I see an email from eBay that didn’t get my label I know something fishy (no pun intended) is going on.

  Note: It’s not enough just to analyze the “from” address of an email when dealing with financial companies because those are often spoofed by the scam artists.

• Bacn – Remember Bacn? We talked about it last year when it was introduced as the “almost spam” emails we often receive on a daily basis. They refer to things like notifications from Facebook or newsletters that you’ve subscribed to. These are emails that you want to read, but don’t want cluttering up your Inbox. I have a ton of various filters set up for things like this, but my main one just applies a “Notifications” label to the email messages and then they skip the Inbox.
• Forwards – I receive quite a few forwards on a daily basis, and I normally never even open them up. Unfortunately the text “FWD” doesn’t show up in the subject line for most of the ones that people send, so I had to take a additional steps to block them all. Here are the two methods that work well for me:
• If you can see every person that they send the forward to go ahead and pick one of the email addresses that you’re not familiar with. Then just create a filter blocking all emails being sent To that address. That way you should still receive any of the personal emails that are directly sent to you while removing all of the ones that are mass-emailed.
• If the BCC (blind carbon copy) was used the previous method won’t work since you can’t see anyone else’s email address. But you likely won’t see you’re email address in the To field either. To get around this create a filter using the sender’s address in the From field, and then enter -youraddress@gmail.com into the To field. The minus sign before your address is crucial because this filter will check for any messages from the sender that aren’t addressed to you.

–Overview–

There’s a lot more that you can do with the filters, and the advanced operators guide by Google will definitely help you out on setting up extensive filters. I’m sure there are a lot of advanced Gmail users out there, and so we want to turn the stage over to you now. Let us know in the comments how you use Gmail filters to cleanup your emails.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Helpful Tip: Advanced Addressing in Gmail
• 20 Things you can do with Gmail Filters
• CyberNotes: Multiple Email Addresses In GMail Filters
• Hack Alert – Check Your Gmail Filters!
• CyberNotes: Your Week In Review With Sunday’s Summary

Apple just sent out an email to MobileMe subscribers to let them know of some new(ish) features. The biggest bullet point is the fact that push is back.

Faster syncing with Mac and PC. Changes you make to contacts and calendars on your Mac (Address Book and iCal) or PC (Microsoft Outlook) are now automatically pushed up to the cloud every time you make an update. Likewise, changes you make on me.com, iPhone, or iPod touch are automatically pushed to your Mac or PC. As a result, your contacts and calendars update faster across all your devices. To take advantage of faster syncing, be sure you’re running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 (Mac) or MobileMe Control Panel 1.3 (Windows).

After a lousy launch in 2008, Apple decided to avoid associating the word “push” with Mobile Me until they could get synchronization between computers and mobile devices (iPhones, iPod touch) down to acceptable times. Looks like it’s close enough now to bring the term back.

Another new feature, iDisk file sharing, has been around since the 13th. Improved iPhone notification and syncing and better web app performance round out the improvements.

Dear MobileMe member:

Over the past few months, we have been working hard to make MobileMe the best service it can be. Here is a summary of the improvements and performance enhancements that have recently been completed.
Easy file sharing. iDisk now makes it even easier to share files that are too big to email. Simply select a file in the iDisk web app and click the Share File button to generate an email with a download link. You can also optionally add password protection and set an expiration date for the link. For more details, view this tutorial.

Faster syncing with Mac and PC. Changes you make to contacts and calendars on your Mac (Address Book and iCal) or PC (Microsoft Outlook) are now automatically pushed up to the cloud every time you make an update. Likewise, changes you make on me.com, iPhone, or iPod touch are automatically pushed to your Mac or PC. As a result, your contacts and calendars update faster across all your devices. To take advantage of faster syncing, be sure you’re running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.6 (Mac) or MobileMe Control Panel 1.3 (Windows).

Improved notifications and sync on iPhone. Reliability of new email notifications and syncing of contacts and calendar with MobileMe have both been improved. To get the best MobileMe experience on your iPhone or iPod touch, you should be running iPhone Software 2.2 or later.

Better web app performance. We have also improved the overall performance of the web apps at me.com including faster start time in Calendar and searching in Contacts. For more details, see this support article.
Remember, to take advantage of these improvements, your computers and devices must be running the latest software versions indicated above.

Our biggest gripe with the Peek email-only handheld has always been the incredibly annoying $19.95 per month data plan. If you jump in today, however, you can forget all about those recurring charges. It seems the suits at Peek have finally stumbled upon what could actually be a viable business model for this unique handset, as they’re offering the unit up for $299.95 with data included for the life of the device. Unfortunately, the deal is a one-day only affair, but truthfully, we fully expect this option to become the norm in the not-too-distant future.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Peek for Life: $299.95 one-day sale means no monthly fees originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 16 Jan 2009 07:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments