Push GMail for iPhone…finally.

A few months back Google launched push contacts and calendars for iPhone. What’s lacking was mail push. It was finally activated last week.

Now, for those who don’t understand push, it means actively notify you of updates. On an iPhone there are two ways to obtain information: fetch and push. Fetch means you actively retrieve info from the server (e.g. fetch mail from mail server), while push means the server actively notifies you of your incoming info and sends you the info. Using Push means you don’t have to work; everything comes to you. As you can see above, I have activated push for mail, contacts, and calendars.

In this case, Google is utilising Microsoft Exchange technology to provide push services for iPhone. If you’re using iPhone and GMail, you can follow the instructions here to get push notifications for your emails.

Apple introduced Push notifications officially this year as a way to compensate for the iPhone OS’s inability to truly multitask. Multitasking doesn’t really matter for me though, and anyway Push is a nice simple feature which doesn’t add much to iPhone/iPod Touch’s CPU and RAM workload.