Did you know there was a (completely flopped) Twitter ‘smartphone’?
A device with which you can Tweet quickly: in the heyday of Twitter, that sounds great. So why did the Twitter Peek, a kind of Twitter smartphone, completely flop?
Sometimes something has all the potential to be a good product. If it seems to respond to a gap in the market and if it fits well with something completely booming is. In that regard, the Twitter Peek sounds like a good idea. This was a 2008 device that could only do one thing: tweet.
Twitter Peek
No really. It was a small handheld with a keyboard and a small screen. Everything you need to get started tweeting. But you could also read tweets from people you follow on Twitter on the Peek. In the days when your phone was still meant for calling and texting and Twitter was really just for your computer, it sounds like a funny idea.
fail
So, was it a success? As you can tell from the fact that you may have never heard of it, no. The Twitter Peek suffered from some functionality issues, but also suffered from the competition. Let’s start with why the performance wasn’t great.
First, because there wasn’t really an interface. You could write a tweet and then view your last ten tweets. That’s fine in itself, but if you’re a bit popular, those ten tweets are replaced with ten other tweets and you can’t read them all. And no, you couldn’t have more than ten tweets on the home screen at once.
Then there’s the problem of integrating regular Twitter functions on the Twitter Peek. If someone sent a tweet with a link or an image, you could only see that an image belongs to it and the link is not usable. So you still had to view the tweet on a computer.
Competition
Which brings us to the second point: the fact that the development in the mobile phone market actually made the device completely redundant. The rapid acceleration of the smartphone thanks to the iPhone 3G(S) around 2009 and 2010 actually ensured that the Twitter Peek was no longer necessary. Not only was it a bit inconvenient to have two devices: your ‘main device’, let’s take that iPhone, could also get the Twitter app since then. It also allowed you to tweet, read tweets (more than 10!) and also click on links and photos. So the Peek was already unpopular and the rise of the iPhone couldn’t help it either.
One last point, if the device was not already doomed: the Twitter Peek had to cost $ 99 in the US. For a device that can only do one thing (and is therefore not the most convenient for it), it is still pricey. So it turned out to be nothing. Like the Facebook smartphone, the ‘Twitter smartphone’ couldn’t be worth it.
