GADGETS

It’s hard to remember now, but the first BlackBerry devices weren’t phones. They were two-way e-mail pagers that couldn’t be used for calls.

Now a New York-based startup is betting it can fill the niche the BlackBerry abandoned. It has made a sleek, $100 e-mail pager called the Peek that hit Target Corp. stores Monday.

The goal of the Peek is to reach the people who don’t already have e-mail on their phones and may be intimidated by today’s feature-rich “smart” phones, like BlackBerrys, BlackJacks and iPhones. The Peek does e-mail and nothing more: no phone calls, no Web surfing, no camera. The service fee is $20 a month, with no contract.

The tablet, 4 inches tall by 2.7 inches wide, is covered by rubber on the front and metal on the back. It has a full-alphabet keyboard with generous spacing between the keys for easy typing. The keys are backlit. The color screen is sharp and relatively large, with a 2.5-inch diagonal. It’s not touch-sensitive, so you control the device with a scroll wheel on the side, just like older BlackBerrys.

It’s reasonably easy to set up for the Web-based e-mail services of Google Inc., Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The service fee compares well to the data plans that are required for e-mail service on a cell phone. These are usually around $30 a month, in addition to the voice plan.

There are drawbacks.

The Peek is slow. It’s partly because it’s sluggish to react to the user, partly because the interface is a bit cumbersome. You need to do at least three things to start creating a new e-mail: press the wheel in, roll it down one step, press again.

The Peek is also slow to get new e-mail. It checks for new e-mail every four or five minutes. This makes it impossible to conduct quick back-and-forth exchanges, which you can do with BlackBerrys and several other e-mail-enabled phones.

The Peek can receive and show pictures attached to e-mails, but because it uses one of the slowest still-extant wireless data networks, the images take about 90 seconds to appear after you click on them.

The Peek isn’t really designed to get office e-mail. You can get it if your corporate e-mail servers have unusually lax security settings.

Also, the Peek’s software is not upgradeable. This is going to limit the company’s ability to fix bugs and introduce new features, though it does have some leeway because it manages the servers that relay the mail.

Associated Press