I meant to post this when it was first announced, but kept forgetting. Some of you probably have already heard this announcement.
Last week Google announced push email for Google Apps and Gmail users. In the past iPhone users could use Google Sync to keep their calendars and contacts on their iPhone. Now Google Sync also includes the ability to push email to your phone.
So how is this different from how I used to check email?
While push email is a great buzzword I've found the user experience isn't much different from when I used IMAP to sync my emails on the iPhone. Push email basically means that when you get an email it is automatically sent to your mobile device. Blackberry users are used to their blackberry vibrating every time they get an email and now iPhone users have the same capability.
The thing is, the iPhone could be setup to automatically download your emails every few minutes from your IMAP email account. And whenever you checked your email account it would usually only take a few seconds to download any messages.
So while push Gmail sounds awesome, people probably won't notice much difference than when they were using IMAP.
To use Google Sync visit m.google.com/sync from your computer. To learn how to setup push email visit http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139195
Read Google's original push Gmail announcement.
