Laptop reviewed the Peek, a US$100 email device for newbies that only does email. In a nutshell: "Kindle is for books, and the Peek is for e-mail." Laptop also reported that the device is a little bit slower to respond than a blackberry. US$15/month on TMO. [Laptop]

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I'm not sure if the Peek emailer is a great idea or a stupid one. Basically, the Peek is a stripped down handheld device with a QWERTY keyboard that does nothing but handle your email. The shaky logic behind the device is research that shows roughly 90% of email users are not checking their email on the go--but why they assume this group would forgo the mobile phone they surely already have for yet another gadget is beyond me. Besides, the Peek is set to debut in Target on Sept 14th for US$100 with T-Mobile service running US$15 a month. That doesn't seem like a value to me.

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Visas and eight banks ("PNC Bank, SunTrust Bank, U.S. Bank, Wachovia, and Wells Fargo in the United States, and Royal Bank of Canada, TD Bank Financial Group, and Vancity in Canada") are testing real-time SMS notifications whenever your card makes one of a few types of transactions. The 2000 pilot beta customers can pick alerts for ATM cash withdrawals, internet or telephone charge, an out-of-country charge or a charge that's over a pre-defined amount. You can choose to have these alerts go to your phone or your email (if you're cheap like us and don't want to burn up all your messages), which you can then immediately use to alert Visa to any fraudulent activity. Great idea or greatest idea? You be the judge. [Slashphone]

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If you thought the post office was slow, get a load of this Real Snail Mail project. Created by the aptly titled Boredom Research team for the SIGGRAPH 2008 Slow Art Exhibition, this snail mail service uses live snails to deliver your email messages via RFID chips planted on the shell. When you compose an email via their website, it will be delivered to one of three "snail agents" who wander aimlessly around a tank. If it should slither within range of a drop off point, the data will be collected wirelessly from the snail and delivered to the recipient.

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David Gallagher at the New York Times had to do some rumour control when a reader wrote accusing Microsoft of prohibiting the word "Tibet" in Hotmail addresses to appease the Chinese government. No "freetibet@hotmail.com", no "tibetsmellsofwetmonks@hotmail.com", no "ilovetibet@hotmail.com." Is this another Chinese-Microsoft evil conspiracy? While there are some of those going on between China and companies like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo, this is not the case.

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Oh, Google is just so great! They have the best free email, calendar, chat, photo and document sharing services, so why not use them all? Well, here's why: they can lock you out of your entire account without any explanation or any way to get it back, pretty much erasing your online existence. It happened to Nick Saber.

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We all know that Apple's MobileMe had a difficult birth: but it's quite another thing to be able to read the criticisms of the service from his Steveness himself. And over at Ars Technica they've got hold of an internal Apple email that Steve Jobs sent out to Apple employees detailing his displeasure that MobileMe was "not up to Apple's Standards." It needed both more time in testing, and a piece-by-piece launch, rather than attempting to launch it as a "monolithic service," he thinks.

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As you can see in the video, MobileMe push mail is now active, fully operative, and perfectly armed. My iPhone is now getting all email in real time, both over a Wi-Fi connection and using a mobile phone network. I even use EDGE--not 3G--and a non-official carrier on roaming. So far, not a single problem. Bad news, RIM: BlackBerry is dead, dead, dead. Dead.

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A leaked email sent out to buyers at GameStop and Blockbuster shows three things that Microsoft will announce before or around E3 next week. One, there's a 60GB Pro console package coming. Two, there's a US$99 60GB hard drive pack for Arcade and Core owners, which comes also with 3 months of Xbox Live, a wired headset and an Ethernet cable. Three, the 120GB hard drive will drop down to US$149 in September. Nothing extraordinary, but all pretty decent announcements for people who don't already have enough space on their 360s. Hit the jump for the full email.

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Seriously, what is going on in England? Isn't this the country that produced 1984? Has anyone read it lately? Because between the insane number of closed circuit cameras placed around Britain and now the governments desire to have an active database of every single phone call and email sent in the country, it's beginning to look like Big Brother is alive and well across the pond.

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