Google Announces Push Updates for Gmail

Posted 09/22/2009 at 2:33pm | by Jason Barry

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Douglas Gresham, software engineer for Google’s Mobile division, announced today on the official Google Mobile blog that they have enabled Push support for Gmail for iPhone and Windows Mobile devices. While other applications such as calendars and contacts already had the capability, Push connectivity for Gmail could only be accomplished using third-party applications.

Smartphone users have been requesting this connectivity for quite some time due to its “always on” feedback. Once new email arrives in your box, you will have it quickly on your phone. In theory, the Push connection method should also reserve battery life because the device is not polling for messages on a set interval, even when there is nothing new.

You can get instructions on how to setup the connection for most mobile devices from the Google Sync help pages. Make sure to backup your phone data before giving this a whirl.

From my experience, once properly set up (takes about 5 minutes) it took my phone (iPhone 3GS) about 45 minutes to fully retrieve all of my data over 3G. So, be patient. The first thing transferred that I noticed were my contacts (just under 100 entries), the last thing was my calendar, email fell somewhere in between.

Have you set it up on your own device? Let us know.