Peek killing off US email and Twitter devices after 'lifelong service'

There's an old saying that eternal love lasts for two years. Apparently, that also applies to Peek's bare bones email and Twitter devices, which launched in 2008 and 2009 respectively. We've received emails from users anxious that their handsets -- all running on T-Mo's network -- stopped working on January 30th, despite them having paid up to $299 for "lifelong service." Although at least some users received emails about this, we've just had confirmation from Peek's CEO, Amol Sarva, that the products really are being abandoned. By way of justification, he told us that they're "seriously old" and have reached their end of life, with only a "handful of users" left in the US. He adds that anyone who bought the $299 one-off bundle still eked out 28 months of service, whereas paying the monthly $19.95 subscription plus extra for the device would have added up to much more. As to why the service is being killed, perhaps we should have taken the hint back in July, because now the company is all about software-only cloud services rather than handsets. Here's some more detail from Sarva himself:

"Unfortunately we cannot maintain the network forever for a few users, so that end time has come. The networks are changing standards, protocols etc and the old units are now end of life. We have lots going with rapid adoption of our software by phone brands around the world, so Peek is flat out building for a number of platforms that our OEM customers are deploying like Android and Mediatek. We are not offering a Peek-made device to replace these old ones."

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Peek killing off US email and Twitter devices after 'lifelong service' originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Feb 2012 07:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/02/02/peek-killing-off-devices/

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