Earlier this year, we launched Google Sync which allows you to synchronize your Gmail Contacts and Google Calendar with your iPhone, Windows Mobile, and S60 devices. Today, we’re adding Gmail support to Google Sync for iPhone, iPod Touch and Windows Mobile devices.
That ‘s straight from the Google Mobile Blog, and it ‘s very good news for iPhone owners who want Gmail push “ as it ‘s an effective, and free, solution coming straight from Google themselves.
I ‘ve been using Google Sync for Contacts and Calendars ever since it launched “ and it has always worked flawlessly and given me two less things to worry about whenever I restore my iPhone. The new Gmail push seems to be working quite well also “ in my quick testing of it this morning.
This may be bad news for apps like PushGmail “ which Thomas posted about earlier today “ and other similar third party apps. Unless you want some of their extra bells and whistles (choosing notification tones, popup alerts and such-like), it ‘s going to be hard to argue with a free and easy solution via Google Sync.
The only other big reason this may not work for some folks is that it requires that you setup Google Sync as an MS Exchange account on the iPhone, and some of you may have already maxed out on Exchange account setup on the iPhone with your corporate setup.
Since I already had Google Sync setup on my iPhone, it took about two seconds to just toggle Mail On within the Settings app once I heard about Gmail push going live. This is really not a feature that I ‘ve needed or wanted up to now, so I ‘m just getting to know the settings available and so forth.
As I said though, push instantly started working when I toggled it on, and is continuing to work just fine. I may have just not found where to set these things as yet “ but thus far I don ‘t see a way to get a popup alert on new mails. It just seems to do a sound alert and an app icon badge update by default.
It also does not seem lightning fast on push as yet “ it ‘s reasonable, but certainly not instant, and again I ‘m not clear on where to go to set it ‘s polling interval to be more constant.
If you need to setup Google Sync on your iPhone “ for push of Gmail, Contacts, Calendar “ Google has a great how-to post that walks you through it HERE.
So all of a sudden we have a number of choices for Gmail push. It ‘s like that old saying about waiting for a bus: for ages there are none, and then three come along at once. Do you want / need Gmail push? If so, which is looking like your favorite solution?
I spotted the news about Gmail push via Google Sync today via my good friend @KRAPPS on Twitter. Thanks mate. 🙂
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TAGS: Gmail push on iPhone, Google Sync
