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According to RussianiPhone.ru, the iPhone 2.2.1 beta firmware apparently contains support for both push notifications as well as over-the-air MobileMe syncing with Notes support.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, push notifications allow you to receive notifications pertaining to a specific application (e.g. instant messanging) on your mobile device without actually having the entire application running in the background.

Check out this video for a much more in-depth explanation. 

You can see from the video that iPhone-users were originally supposed to receive push notifications back in September, but according to an email sent by Steve Jobs, ”We’re running a bit late. We want to get it 100% right the first time.”

“In the current iPhone firmware, applications are not allowed to run any background tasks. As a result, an application like a Instant Messaging application would be unable to notify the user that a new message had arrived. Push notifications would provide the tools to trigger these alerts.” 

Remember, this is just a rumor and has yet to be corroborated by any official source!

[MacRumors]