Google’s iPhone App Adds Calendar Alerts, Useless Gmail Feature

• By Brian X. Chen
• From: http://www.wired.com/

Apple and Google haven’t been BFFs lately, but the search giant still seems to care about iPhone users. Kind of, sort of. Google this week released an update for its Google Mobile app for iPhone, which introduces push notifications for Google’s calendar and a barely functional push feature for Google mail.

For iPhone users subscribed to Google calendars, the Google Mobile app can now push out an event alert in a box that appears on the home screen, just like you’d receive an SMS message. That’s useful.

But for Google mail, the new push feature is somewhat less useful. The updated app doesn’t push out a box to let you know of a new e-mail. Instead, it just updates the icon of the Google Mobile app, adding a little red bubble that shows the number of e-mails in your inbox. This “notification” doesn’t cause the iPhone to vibrate or make a sound. The result is that the Gmail notifier is essentially useless, since you can already configure Gmail to “push” into Apple’s built-in Mail app with sounds and vibrations — the whole shebang — to actually notify you.

Frankly, we’re disappointed that the push feature for Google mail isn’t more functional. Adding the ability to push e-mails in the form of an alert box, just like Google did with calendar, would’ve been far more interesting.

If that’s what you’re looking to get from Google mail, you can download the third-party iPhone app GPush, which we covered last year.

Now We’re Talking: AIM With Push Support Hits The App Store

by MG Siegler

There’s been a lot of talk the past few days since the launch of the iPhone 3.0 software about the lack of Push Notification apps in the App Store. Well, today brings a big one: AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).

Instant messaging apps are perhaps the perfect use for Push Notification, which allows you to use such services without requiring that they be open at all time. In our test of the pre-release beta version of the AIM app with Push, the messages were sent almost instantaneously. In testing it out right now, it looks to be just as fast.

When you first fire up this new version of AIM, it asks you if you’d like to receive Push notifications. You can change this at any time in the settings. And you can also choose if you’d like the notifications to be brief (only say that you have a new IM), feature the sender’s name only, be normal size, or full size.

You can also set how you’d like Push messages to show up on your phone for each app in the device’s settings. You can have it pop up a message, play a sound, badge your icon or do any combination of those.

And Push works with both the free [iTunes link] and paid version [iTunes link] of the app. The $2.99 paid version removes all advertising.

Push is great for services like IM, but it doesn’t resolve the lack of iPhone background support for all apps. With Push you still can’t listen to Pandora while doing something else on the web, for example. I still believe it’s only a matter of time before we see some sort of third-party background task support as well.

Update: While users are reporting that they aren’t receiving notifications to update their apps yet, if you use the links above, it is the latest version with Push.

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CrunchBase Information

AIM iphone App

Company:

AOL

The Aim iPhone App allows you to send and recieve messages of WiFI, EDGE, or 3G networks. Learn More

iPhone

Company:	Apple
Website:	apple.com/iphone
Launch Date:	January 1, 2007

Apple’s iPhone was introduced at MacWorld in January 2007 and officially went on sale June 29, 2007, selling 270,000 units within 2 days of launch. The phone (as well as its newer self, the… Learn More

Information provided by CrunchBase