Google adds push notifications to Mobile App

Google has updated their Mobile App for iPhone with push notifications for Gmail and Calendar. The update is live on the App Store right now, so I suggest you go and grab it right away. The new updates include its ability to not only push notifications to your phone when you have a calender event or new email, but also it can now search weather, flight and stock info, and do money conversions.

Honestly, I’ve struggled to find a good use for this app in the past, and this update doesn’t fix that for me. It’s a great way to search for information on your phone, especially location based data. You don’t even have to type anything, because the app will listen to your voice. But most of the time, I’m most comfortable just typing into the search bar on Safari.app. And I prefer to use iCal to Google calender, so the notifications merely end up being a replication of the badge update on Mail.app for me.

This is because push notifications for Gmail seem to only be badge updates. That means you won’t be getting a pop up window with a preview of your message, unless I’m missing something here. It appears that only calender notifications get text preview pop ups, and that drained all of the excitement out of this update for me. Still, if you’re an avid Google calendar user, you’re probably still pretty psyched.

So go download it now. At the very least, you’ll get free push notifications for Gmail and Google calender. And better yet, you may find a pretty powerful search tool along the way.

Product [Google Mobile App]