According to a recent report over on TechCrunch, it looks like we may be getting (a form of) Push notification for Gmail on the iPhone. I do feel that it is important to say “a form of” because the Push support is coming in the form of a 99 cent app called GPush, which from as best as I can tell will have some good points and bad points.
To begin with, the price seems to be pretty fair, however this Push, due to the fact that is comes from an app and not native from Gmail will mean more pop-up alerts on your iPhone. Personally, those bug me, but on the plus side, you will get a small preview of the email in the form of who it is from along with the subject line.
According to the information that I have read, the app is simple to use and only requires you to login to your Gmail account and after that you will begin getting alerts. The one drawback that I see is that I cannot tell whether this will be able to support multiple Gmail accounts. Otherwise, the email alerts are noted as taking “about 10-30 seconds” to show up, which in my opinion is pretty reasonable.
Additionally, in terms of battery life, it appears as if that will not be much of an issue, because GPush is doing the work in the background. The heavy lifting, or in this case, the frequent checking is done on “Tiverias‘ (the company behind the app) servers.”
All in all, I think this may be worth a look, that is assuming it passes the test and makes it into the App Store. According to the developer, it should be approved because “nothing went into the code that violated either Apple’s or Google’s Terms of Service,”
In the meantime I will continue to use my Mobile Me account for my email needs.
July 8th, 2009 at 6:48 am
Interesting! I wonder what will happen when you get about 20 emails at once. Nuevasync also just launch a similar service but native one that works with active sync the down side it cost $25/annum.
July 8th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Looking forward to checking this out, when it hits the app store.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
I kinda think this should be a freebie – I mean, I know 99c isn’t going to break the bank but it’s a really useful gmail thing that Google should have investigated and instigated.
July 8th, 2009 at 2:46 pm
@iwantiphone: true enough, but google isn’t making this, and the overhead required to check these accounts isn’t free. This app is worth way more than 99cents.
July 8th, 2009 at 4:35 pm
I agree with Micah, this is not coming from Google, therefor I can justify the $0.99 price. On the other hand, if this was an official Google app, then I could make an argument for it to be free. That said, if this hits the app store I will gladly spend the money.
July 9th, 2009 at 2:04 am
Google has the resources and the servers to do the pushing… but… since they have the G1, they don’t want to give anything to it’s customers…
I guess it’s time we move to yahoo.
July 13th, 2009 at 4:38 am
Input my GMail username and password into a 3rd party app? Yeah, lemme know how that works out for ya