Peek, a New York mobile start-up, has begun selling TwitterPeek, a new device for posting and reading Twitter updates.

TwitterPeek became available on Amazon (AMZN) and Peek’s Web site Tuesday. Its $100 price includes a full keyboard, always-on tweet delivery and nationwide Internet coverage, plus six months of service. After that, service costs $8 a month, but there is no contract. An alternate lifetime plan, without monthly charges, costs $200.

Peek sells other handheld devices that aren’t cellphones, including the Peek Classic and Peek Pronto, which are designed for emailing and text-messaging but don’t make calls. It’s pitching TwitterPeek as a way to “unleash the thrill of Twitter on the go,” particularly for Twitter users without smart phones.

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As school starts again, there’s so much more for a parent to nag about. Homework. Bedtime. Lost hours on Facebook and Xbox. The chores that need to be squeezed in.

But in the age of the digital childhood, Jacky Longwell, 45, mother of three in McLean, often text-messages what she once uttered as her children rushed out the door: Be nice to your brother. Walk the dog. Remember your reading.

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About 80 percent of U.S. adults support laws banning text messaging while driving, according to a new survey from Nationwide Insurance.

The survey, conducted in early August with 1,008 Americans, found solid majorities in favor of a texting ban even among drivers born between 1977 and 1988 (73 percent), the youngest demographic surveyed.

Generation Y’s support for driving-while-texting bans–a hot-button topic that has gotten considerable attention in recent weeks–was unexpectedly strong, said Bill Windsor, associate vice president of the office of safety at Nationwide, a Columbus, Ohio, car-insurance provider.

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People are increasingly using their mobile phones for tasks previously performed by a computer. So it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that cyber bad guys are turning their attention to the devices.

This year’s Black Hat conference, an annual gathering where security professionals show off the latest and greatest in hacking techniques and computer vulnerabilities, will for the first time feature an entire track on threats to mobile devices. Among the topics to be discussed Thursday are techniques for crashing an iPhone, and how to use SMS–the protocol used for text messages–to take over someone’s mobile phone.

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The explosion of low-cost, prepaid wireless plans are raking in the customers during this recession, and Boost Mobile, a division of Sprint (S) that boasts an estimated 4 million users, is no different.

But subscribers to Boost’s $50 unlimited plan, which was rolled out last January, have been experiencing delays in text message delivery, reports the AP, implying that the company may be experiencing some growing pains.

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Julie Zingeser texts at home, at school, in the car while her mother is driving. She texts during homework, after pompon practice and as she walks the family dog. She takes her cellphone with her to bed.

Every so often, the hum of a new message rouses the Rockville teen from sleep. “I would die without it,” Julie, 15, says of her text life.

This does not surprise her mother, Pam, who on one recent afternoon scans the phone bill for the eye-popping number that puts an exclamation point on how growing up has changed in the digital age. In one busy month, Pam finds, her youngest daughter sent and received 6,473 text messages.

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Text messaging is a wonderful business to be in: About 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year. The public assumes that the wireless carriers’ costs are far higher than they actually are, and profit margins are concealed by a heavy curtain.

Senator Herb Kohl, Democrat of Wisconsin and the chairman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, wanted to look behind the curtain. He was curious about the doubling of prices for text messages charged by the major American carriers from 2005 to 2008, during a time when the industry consolidated from six major companies to four.

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Hate on the kiddies and their SMS speak all you want, but text messaging is taking off among the masses. AT&T has released data from two studies it recently commissioned, showing that both families and romantic partners are using SMS more and more to communicate. Parents think texting with their kids makes them cool, while lovestruck texters are finding themselves using SMS to flirt and send romantic notes.

We’ll start with the families. AT&T conducted 1,048 online interviews with parents and 1,022 online interviews with children and young adults to get a feel for their usage patterns.

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Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster, perhaps the most bullish analyst on the Street on Apple (AAPL) shares–he maintains a Buy rating and $250 price target–wrote a detailed analysis today on what the true cost of the iPhone 3G will be for U.S. consumers. In short, while the retail price, at $199, is half the old price, other costs will make this version more expensive than the old over the life of the required two-year contract. And secondly, he estimates that the actual costs of the hardware will be a lot higher than the stated $199 price tag.

One issue, as Munster notes, is that the data plan for the first generation iPhone phone was $20 a month, including unlimited data and 200 text messages a month, on top of a voice plan. For the new phone, the data plan is $30 a month, and it will run you another $5 a month for 200 text messages. On that basis, the data-related fees over the course of two years will actually be $360 higher than before, or considerably more than the $200 cut in the hardware price.

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If you thought gas prices were rising too quickly, check out what’s been happening to text messaging. Since 2005, rates to send and receive text messages on all four major carrier networks have doubled from 10 cents to 20 cents per message. This percentage of increase is on par with similar price hikes at the gas pump as crude oil prices skyrocket. In 2005, Americans paid on average about $2.27 per gallon for gas compared with more than $4 a gallon today.

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With technologies like TiVo and text messaging taking over the world, marketers are being forced to rethink their approach to advertising.

The New York Times writes that NBC is hearkening back to its roots by moving beyond the 30-second commercial to form bigger, longer-term relationships with advertisers.

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