Apple has finally brought push notifications to the table for the iPhone and iPod touch. Fair enough, they’re a few months later than they originally said, but it’s here now, so lets take a look.
Push notifications is going to provide a happy-medium in some ways. Apple have said that by having applications open in the background, battery life dropped by around 80%. So rather than allowing for this on their OS 3.0 firmware update, they’re going to use push notifications. This keeps a constant connection with the applications servers and pushes new data directly to your device. This way, the battery life only drops by around 23%, rather than 80%. Sounds like a good start to me.
Apple will offer developers three options for notifying users of updates. The first would appear like a text message does on your home screen. It’ll mostly likely show the sender and message of say, and IM conversation. The second is badge alerts. In the same way that email and SMS shows you how many new messages you have, applications will now be able to update the badge number, depending on new messages or notifications that come through. This will probably be the most used of the three, but in some cases, it will likely be used along side one of the others, if not both. The third method, is of course a sound alert. Again, when you receive a text message and your iPhone is in the normal settings (not on silent), you’ll here a sound letting you know of a new message. Hopefully a visual message will guide you to which application sent the message, else like me, you’ll be going through pages of applications.
Having push notifications available to you, will allow you to be connected 24/7. When ever you get a new friend request on Facebook, or a chat on AIM, where ever you are, you’ll know about it. If you’re using the iPod touch, you’ll get the same service as long as you’re connected to a WiFi network.
Push notifications seemed to have been forgotten during the recent hype up to this Apple event. Copy and paste took the center stage for rumors mainly. But we’re all glad that Apple’s push service is finally here, and I for one cannot wait to upgrade to OS 3.0. It’s not clear when 3.0 will become available to iPhone and iPod touch users, as today’s event is simply a preview. You can be sure that we’ll let you know as soon as it’s available.
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im happy to see that the 3.0 software will include push notifications. but do you know if the push notification will be on the ipod touch update, because i know some of the features arent included.
What I am wondering, if you have your wifi on at home and you get a push notification come through, does it automatically use wifi to do this or does it do it with your data on your phone plan. Also if you are away froam a wifi connection how does push work is it that the phone is constantly downloading from websites such as face book so that when the notifications come through they get pushed to your phone? I guess what I mean is that is it going to be more expensive and will you use more data if you are not near a wifi connection??