Twitter Peek
Starting this list off strong is the Twitter Peek: a $100 handheld just for using Twitter. That’s it. No email, no phone calls, not web browsing—nada. This device’s sole purpose was to put the hellsite at your fingertips for just $7.95 per month.
Look, I get that the aughts were a wild time for tech. Smartphones were still a new thing, handhelds had physical QWERTY keyboards and companies were still placing their bets on where the nascent mobile industry might go. Devices that only let you read and send emails, like the original Peek, weren’t laughed at immediately and actually saw moderate success among consumers still waffling about whether smartphones were worth the monthly fees.
But by 2009, the writing was already on the wall. So when the weirdos behind Peek rolled out a Twitter-dedicated device, critics eviscerated it. Rightly so, too. Its tiny 2.5-inch display could only handle the first 20 characters of the tweets on your timeline; you’d have to click on each tweet individually to read the rest. What I would give to be a fly on the wall during whatever focus group thought this was a good idea.
