Trying BlackBerry Alternatives For Work Email, Testing the Peek Pronto!

Today I want to share a problem I am dealing with at my work. Managing the IT department it is up to me to use my general IT knowledge to advance the company and cut costs where appropriate. Now cutting costs is easy, the hard part is not losing quality of service while doing it.

Our current cell phone bill for our company wireless phones seemed to be slowly drifting out of control. After analysing our bill I noticed that we have a few people who are using a ton of minutes on the plan and others who aren’t using anything. Now this isn’t really a big deal with a normal, voice only, phone since those typically utilize shared minutes and cost about $10.00 per month to keep on the plan. The real problem with this scenario are higher prices phones that aren’t taking advantage of all of their costs.

This brings me obviously to the one and only, BlackBerry.

We have approximately 10 BlackBerry users. Each BB costs approximately $55 a month in addition to any shared minute pool costs. I can see on our bill that each BB user is actively using its data capabilities to stay in constant contact via the company’s email system. This is good, this is why we cover the cost of the phone for them! However I also noticed a few users who were using low minutes, like 9 minutes a month for one user, 23 a month for another one.

Basically what this turns out to be is users were issued BlackBerry devices but they never stop using their personal cell phone. I can relate to this, why ditch your regular cell phone if the company may some day ditch you and you are out your cell number. There are obviously numerous other drawbacks to switching to a company provided phone.

So in the interest of looking at some cost savings I wanted to check out some alternatives to BlackBerry services. There are obviously TONS of cell phones that can do email but the data costs are basically the same. Then I stumbled upon the Peek Pronto. The peek is a small handheld device that utilizes cell phone antenae services to download emails. THATS IT! It does no voice, no websites, just email (well that and texting via email services).

So how could this benefit us? Well basically these users who are still using their own personal cell phones are already carrying around two devices with the BB so ditching the BB for a similar item shouldn’t be too much of an issue. The Peek Pronto is WAAAAY cheaper! The Peek’s monthly service bill (yes you still need to pay for it since it uses cell services) starts off at $20 per month, if you pay on a month to month basis. If you opt to pay for a whole year up front it drops to only $15 a month. They also offer the option of a One Time $250 payment that will grant the device lifetime access. Let’s do the math, if we switched two low minute usage BB users to the Peek and paid an upfront $250 fee we would cover ourselves in $250/$55 = 4.5, 5 Months until ROI is achieved! Lets just say that the users go 2 years with these devices, that equates to saving, $1,045 in savings over the initial investment! Now imagine if you have a larger company and were able to switch say, 100 users!

Now the QoS(quality of service) comes back into play. How reliable is the Peek Pronto’s service? How useful is the device? Does it actually work? How secure is it? These are all questions that would need to be answered. My biggest fear is security. With the BlackBerries we run a BB Enterprise Server that allows us to remotely wipe the devices if they are lost/stolen. This makes it so that confidential emails aren’t that risky on the company BBs. The Peek doesn’t appear to have this as an option. It is essentially a wireless POP3 email checker, so you can change your email password remotely and the lost/stolen device wouldn’t sync to new email but it would still contain what has been downloaded to the device.

So Let’s Try It!

With such a low investment cost of only $60 for the device and $20 for 1 month of service, I figured I would pick up a temp one to test it out. It arrived in the mail the other day and so far I’m not that impressed. I’ve had a few bugs pop up already (ie: emails get downloaded 2x sometimes, showing two copies in the inbox). The service isn’t as fast as a BlackBerry even though it is supposed to be an instant push. The device is a neat idea but I certainly have my doubts on if it could replace a BlackBerry email service without losing substantial QoS.

I will update as a use more.