Apple Thoughts: iPhone 3.0: Push Notifications

Let's face it; this is the one thing most of us were waiting for the longest and with breath most baited. Since Apple seems dead-set against background applications, this is as good as it's going to get if you don't want to jailbreak your phone. I've always hated the idea of bouncing a notification off a third party server, but there are certain advantages to the app not running. While I think they exaggerated the battery life hit of a background application, this definitely does save battery life.

It'll be nice to have an IM application that can "stay running" when closed, too. Currently, BeeJive does a good job of this by pusing MobileMe e-mails to your phone when a notification comes in and you're offline, but that's less than ideal. In the implementations shown by ESPN and Meebo, you can really see that this does have a lot of potential despite its potential shortcomings.

I'm taking a wait and see on this one with the hope that it's as good as it can be rather than as big a disaster as the devil on my shoulder is telling me it will be. I just hope it was worth the extended wait.

That's it for our iPhone 3.0 announcement coverage. There was a lot of other small stuff announced that we didn't cover, but I think we covered the most important features. Jeff and I will have our thoughts on 3.0 and what it means for users tomorrow. Thanks for reading!