I had a long and interesting conversation with my husband last night, a non-Twitter user (well, he has tweeted ONCE in his life – he does have an account) about this TwitterPeek gadget. If you haven’t yet heard about it, TwitterPeek is a new Twitter-only device that has been released. I was going on and on about how stupid it was, and how it seems short-sighted and pundits predict it will fail and possibly Twitter should not have authorized the branding and association of it.

He had a different take and now I have to wonder if this could be something the creators were thinking about. To the electronic, phone-happy, can’t live a minute without some internet access population (the bulk of my friends on Twitter), this gadget seems like a terrible idea. It’s much more limited than a smartphone, doesn’t offer full functions like a Kindle does for a book (meaning, since you can’t see links and pics you are dead in the water except for seeing and responding to tweets) and it looks like an over-sized calculator. Here’s what we came up with as possible uses for this limited device though… I see this gadget from a new perspective after our talk:

Connectivity to your children: For $99 + $8 a month or $199 LIFETIME access, you could get one of these things for your kids far cheaper than a mobile phone, set up a private network of family and known friends only and have some feeling of security if you are on Twitter a lot (which I am) that your kids could reach you with a tweet when needed, and that you could see when they tweet and who they’re talking to. Twitter has a minimum age requirement I think, so you’d need to look into that, but this could come in very handy if you have kids that you don’t quite want to phone-enable yet.

Replacement for phones in dispatch situations: If you’re paying for phones with any kind of access beyond voice calls, you’re going to be paying a lot more per month than you would with this device. Twitter cabbies, delivery services, police departments, medical institutions… there could be a large list of possible buyers if you look at the systems and processes you could put in place with this device rather than using mobile phones. Tremendous cost savings depending on what you’re doing.

Team communicators: Nextel used to be the big thing to have for construction crews and folks that work with each other, but some distance apart from each other (such as when doing road construction or a large building or even in the oil field.) It is VERY costly though… these devices would be cheaper by a significant amount if you are outfitting crews with ways to reach each other. (Yes, the learning curve would be they have to learn to tweet instead of talk, but that is a process change you might want to make to save money.)

I still don’t know that the TwitterPeek will take off. It all depends on the marketing and branding they do – right now most people who see it are techies or at least Twitter-oriented already and the limitations seem so obviously unappealing that they view it negatively. I see it a little differently if used as I described it here now… it remains to be seen if that is how the company will actually promote it or not.

I have to add, right now I am phoneless. My dumbphone (an Alltel LG Scoop) is broken and I am waiting to buy a smartphone this Friday (Motorola Droid or HTC Droid Eris mostly likely.) Now… if I were NOT in this situation, and this Twitter gadget came out that let me get online and talk to my friends any dang time I wanted to, from any city, any place, anywhere, for $200 one-time fee… well, I might be tempted. LOL!! It’s hard to be on the road and be able to read things from my dumbphone and not be able to respond. But probably, that’s just me.