Google Mobile App for the iPhone has just received a significant update bringing push notifications for Gmail and Google calendar to your mobile. Get your hands on it here (update: According to Google the update may not immediately available, keep checking).
The significance here is that you don’t even need to use the iPhone’s mail client. Everything’s web based, just as Google wants it. It’s a smart way for google to maintain its focus on web apps yet ensuring users are able to get local notifications on their phone in real time.
Gmail users, will you stick to your local iPhone Mail App or shift loyalty to Gmail’s mobile gmail web app? Personally, if there’s one thing holding me back from using Gmail’s mobile Gmail web client, it’s the inability to send from the multiple addresses.
You could do this forever already but adding your gmail account as a microsoft exchange account in the settings. Calendar, Contacts, Email, all pushed and updated live.
right but that means setting up on your phone. With this, you don’t even need to use the iPhone’s mail client. Everything’s web based.
Awesome, Calender notification is what I was looking for. Now they should also add Google voice actions to this iPhone app :)
I’ve never gotten the push to work right using exchange and have ALWAYs reverted back to fetch. I’ll believe this when I see it.
Nice. But you can’t send from multiple adresses in the native mail app either, right?
sure you can, just add another email account.
I suspect one advantage of native is that once mail is downloaded it is cached whereas web apps tend to require connectivity at the point of use.
Hmm, I’ve been syncing my google calendar with the iPhone calendar for some time already with google calendar sync.
Push Gmail and contacts is interesting.
Ok, I tried this last night and about the only thing I see that it brings new is the Gmail notification icon.
It basically notifies you that you have n-number of gmails waiting, then when you click on it, it fires off Safari, goes to Gmail mobile interface and shows them to you.
So again, the only thing new is the notification.
But, nice of the folks at Google to kick out yet another freebie whose underlying purpose is to drive traffic to their site(s).
Can’t blame em!
Push doesnt work for me on ios4
If you are an avid or long term Gmail user you may remember that once upon a time Google had an offline solution for the Web-based email service. That solution was Google Gears, but Google pulled the plug on Gears in early 2010 to focus on an HTML5 solution instead. I don’t think anyone expected it would take 18 months for the new offline tool to emerge, but now it is here.-Yochanan Berkowitz