There’s a relatively new player on the mobile email scene, called Peek. They make a device called, believe it or not, the Peek, and have just released a new, evolved device – the Peek Pronto.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been able to test a unit from Peek. It’s lived either in my pocket or backpack for about four weeks now, and has been my primary source for email when I’m not sitting at my computer. I turned off email on my cell phone, and let the Peek take over.

The Peek Pronto is a $60 device that gives you unlimited mobile email and texting. You pay around $20/month for the service (which I found to be surprisingly good), and you get up to five supported email addresses that will get downloaded to the device. The $20/month, for me, is about what I pay for texting already, so it’s certainly not a bad deal.

It’s an email device, and only an email device. It’s not a phone, or a PDA – it just does email. And that’s on purpose. Peek’s goal is to corner mobile email for non-Blackberry users, not to enter the already-crowded smartphone market. If you want all the bells and whistles, Peek is going to sorely disappoint you; and that’s a good thing with this device.

But first things first: why on Earth can no one come up with a better way to package things other than the “Jaws of Life” that seem to be so popular? Are they trying to make you earn the use of the device, so you appreciate it more once your bloody, exhausted fingers finally grasp the thing? It honestly took me ten minutes to open the darn package – this isn’t unique to Peek, but come on, world, get it together.

Anyway, once I bandaged my fingers, I fired the Peek up. It came with about an 80% charge, which is a nice touch – charging things for 8 hours before I get to play with them always kills me.

The device is like the old-school Blackberries, with the scroll wheel on the side that controls everything. You click the wheel to enter the menus, and a back button to get out them. For anyone who’s used a Blackberry, the Peek is a no-brainer; it’s a little more complicated for newbies, but still pretty darn easy.

Setting up the Peek is stupidly easy – just turn the thing on, give it your name, email address and password, and you’re done. There’s no need for server settings, no SSL warning, nothing. Peek clearly paid attention to making use of the device as easy as possible, and it really does show.

The Peek, once set up, started downloading my Inbox. It took its sweet time the first time, long enough that I thought it might have been frozen, but after a few minutes did in fact display my whole Inbox. After the first download, though, incoming emails were incredibly fast to download – the Peek uses the great Push software that makes Blackberries so fantastic.

Opening an email takes just one click of the scroll wheel, and things like replying and forwarding only take two. My inbox was a little harder to get through, because the Peek didn’t preserve any of my email filters – a bit of a pain for me, because I’ve got things like Twitter emails (which I get a lot of) filtered into their own folders.

I ran into a couple of other snags along the way, too: the keyboard is proprietary, and symbols and punctuation were in different places than I was used to. The keyboard is big and comfy to use, but figuring out where everything was took a bit of getting used to. There’s also no evident way to turn off or change the vibration and light that are activated whenever you’ve got a new message – though both are unobtrusive and nicely handled.

All in all, though, I liked the Peek a lot. It’s a simple device, attractive, and useful. Its battery lasted several days, with regular use, and over a week with little use while I was on vacation. Emails are easy to scan, read, and respond – I plowed through my inbox much faster than I would on my smartphone.

It won’t replace my smartphone’s email, just because it’s another device that I’d rather not carry, but you know what? I’m not the target audience for the Peek. Peek is after people who don’t want or need all the bells and whistles (not to mention added expense) of a smartphone, and just want simple and easy mobile email access. That’s a huge market, and Peek’s doing quick work of taking it over.

Stay tuned – I’ve got a Peek you can win! With service (I think). More to come later.