The new TwitterPeek is getting widely panned right now, including by my friends Kim LaCapria over at Inquisitr as well as fellow ANGLEr, Sean P. Aune.

Sean posted on one of his blogs, StarterTech, rounding up the history of the Peek and what’s new with the TwitterPeek:

Peek is a mobile device company that seems to specialize in devices for people that have never explored the capabilities of their cell phones.  The first device from the company, simply called Peek, was a device dedicated to delivering only emails to you.  They branded it as a way to save $100’s over buying a smart phone, lower monthly plans, etc, etc.  The problem is that it is another device to carry around with you, and even non-smartphone options are beginning to offer email capabilities.  It was pretty much of a joke device, but yet it must have had some success because it has now spawned the TwitterPeek.

The TwitterPeek uses the exact same body as the original Peek (i.e. massive cost cutting), but all this device does is Twitter.  Look, we love Twitter around here, but the idea of a device that does nothing but Twitter just makes us scratch our heads.  Yes, it does offer all of the Twitter features you want such as ReTweeting, direct messages, replies and so on, but, again, Twitter is all this device does … nothing else.

As you may remember from my previous rants, I’m a MetroPCS customer, mostly for the price.  Bootstrapping a startup on a shoestring is financially painful work, and I don’t have the luxury of affording an iPhone with a monstrous AT&T long term contract.  I pay about $100 a month for two phones (one for my wife, and one for me), both with unlimited email, text and calling.

The only problem is that, as I’ve noted many times, MetroPCS seems to have a hate-on for Web 2.0 (and continued here).  In the interests of limiting either cross-niche growth or network costs, texting outside the network is sometimes squirrelly, Twitter texting is completely out of the question, and email works only sometimes.

Every time I think of switching to a real phone and network, though, I look at the price, and how I use the phone (not how I could use the phone), and realize that I just can’t justify the cost of the added “cool factor.” 

Frankly, it comes down to the fact that I’m not in San Francisco all that much, and so I don’t get sidelong glances of disapproval from my peers for not owning an iPhone. Without peer pressure, the decision to go cheap is easy.

The one thing I do miss the three or four hours a day I typically spend away from my laptop is the ambient awareness of what’s going on in my world, and frankly, I see this device as an economical solution to augment my connectivity.

The Hard Numbers: How the Peek Wins

In my immediate circle of friends, there are only a few folks that actually have AT&T iPhones, so after polling a few folks on my IM list, I finally got responses with some information regarding what it costs after taxes to keep an iPhone.  The average cost after taxes seems to be between $110-$130 depending on what part of the country you’re in, which add-ons you have, and assuming you’re getting a voice +  data plan.

Compared to the MetroPCS plan of straight voice service, after taxes, coming to about $32.00 a month and a Peek plan being about $7.95 a month, the choice is clear.

Sure, you don’t get access to the thousands of apps in the iPhone store, but if you know what you want, and you’re in my business, the economical choice is to get separate devices per set of functions. 

Quite honestly, I’m reminded of my early days in tech when I was one of the earliest users of the Blackberry device, which was basically a glorified pager, allowing limited two way text access. The reason they gained popularity, though, is that they were significantly cheaper than a phone with a texting plan at the time (not to mention a heck of a lot more portable than a phone tethered to your car)… and quite a bit more utilitarian. After all, when was the last time you placed a voice call with your web server for diagnostic purposes?

For the social media consultant or professional blogger, the Peek could be an invaluable device.  Bloggers are known for many things, but being rich isn’t generally one of them.  Given that, we could legitimately see a rise of these types of single-purpose devices.  I could easily see myself owning a TwitterPeek, a FacebookPeek, a Kindle-like device and my Metro phone and still pay much less per month than the average smartphone user.

This is exactly the type of device that the major networks should dread. The top-tier networks (read: everyone aside from Verizon, MetroPCS and the MVNOs, pre-Droid) push up their numbers by selling trendy add-on services as an incentive to buy the expensive stuff. They’ve left a hole in the market below them for savvy device manufacturers to create these single purpose devices that can undercut prices in a big way.