Peek Pronto

Pros: Low cost, no contract email and texting (kind of), bundled in a lightweight easy to use (though somewhat crippled) package. Some of the technical staff are amazingly knowledgeable and considerate. Company has personal support.

Cons: There is NO way to text FROM a cell phone to a peak directly; the cell phone user MUST use an SMS to email gateway address if their SMS client will not permit an email address in the SMS "to" line (many permit numbers only), or..., send you an email.

Summary: Delivery times are terrible for email, between 6 and 15 minutes); Peek says they are working on it, but they've been saying that for quite some time (service times seem to fluctuate rather dramatically).

Contrary to what the CNET review says ( It will come from a 10-digit number associated with your Peek Pronto handheld, which they can then send messages to as well), you cannot send a text message directly to a peek device. It MUST go through and SMS to EMAIL gateway, which then gets dropped into your email account, which then gets picked up by PEEK and converted to a "pseudo" text message.

No threaded discussions in SMS of any kind.
System does not automatically highlight the newest messages first (one click open, for example, upon new message arrival).
Push email flat out doesn't work on Peek. Works fine on my Windows Mobile Phone and my Blackberry, both of which are setup with Hotmail and GMail, but don't work at all with Peek. Supposedly coming, but I don't see it on the horizon.
Seems to be a poorly implemented clone of the worst parts of the Sidekick infrastructure.
No rich content email (no hyperlinks, no images, no nothing, just everything converted to text).
Need a special cable that has a usb to serial converter board in it to do ROM upgrades; why they can't put a USB chip in this thing is beyond me, they cost mere pennies.

If they fix the performance problems of the backend, actually ISSUE THE TMOBILE NUMBER FOR THE DEVICE so that SMS works like it's supposed to, add a USB chip to the device so that the proprietary cable can go away, add threaded messaging, fix PUSH email, and add at least some support for formatted message content, this thing will be a messaging killer.

Until then, hold on to your current phone and messaging plan.