iPhone Push Notification API released to select developers

@ DistortedLoop

big question homeslice..have you actually given it a try????
you talk a lot...complain a lot...try it, "yourself" not someone else..you, actually you, try it. a controlled consistent condition could be actually "your daily use" as I said earlier try it one day...if it is different from your other days, guess what, you look at what changed in your test, your controlled conditions, and look at the difference. whats new, whats changed, you look at the evidence, and make a conclusion. If nothing changed within your controlled environment,then you try something else...Either way, there are all sorts of things you can do to save battery life on your phone, and stil be able to use all the features and functions of your phone.

Steve said that they will maintain a continuous IP connection with the phones so that they can push notifications.... Won't this tell them if the phone is jailbroken ?

@unlikelee - Kind of arrogant for you to call those who feel a need to have push email "anal." The frequency of how often someone needs email is a personal decision based on their own needs; just because they're different than your own, why call them anal?

That said, my only problem with everyone saying that push email is what is killing the battery is the apparently forgotten fact that Yahoo Mail has ALWAYS been push on the iPhone, SINCE DAY ONE. While the first iPhone's battery life wasn't stellar, it was acceptable considering what the device is, but that's just not the case, and I used push for Yahoo and 30 minutes for other services

So, if you can take a break from calling me anal for wanting to have my email pushed instead of fetched, please explain to me and all the other anal folks what has changed in the push service all of a sudden to change it from a battery-friendly option to one that kills the iPhone in a matter of hours? Please, explain it if you can.

If you can't explain what's different, than you don't know what you're talking about and should probably leave your opinion about who is anal and who is not to yourself...

My understanding of how push on the iPhone worked was that when an email hit the server, a hidden SMS was sent to the phone saying come check for your new message, which results in firing up the radio to establish a connection only when it's known there is a message. That seems a more battery friendly method than firing up the radio just to go see if there is a new email on a routine schedule.

The issue here is that this is going to be inhibitive to free apps not supported by large companies (like AOL). The free apps (e.g. Adium) will have to provide servers to connect to your IM accounts when you aren't directly connected, to watch for new messages. It's likely protocols won't be fast enough to log you in on the client each time you get a message, so all your messages will have to travel through these 3rd party servers too. That means writing a new IM protocol that can buffer messages on the server and pass them on to the client each time it's reopened...

That's a lot of extra cost involved.

The push notifications solves some problems, but it's not well suited for IM - whatever Apple says. Apple can do background apps. How hard can it be to give icons on the home screen a glowing border to indicate they're running? Sure, it uses battery, but that's the user's choice.

NetNewsWire already does this, and it's had no noticable impact on battery life for me (but I have push switched off, so it's presumably onlly checking every half hour).

So, there's a persistent connection with my iPhone to Apple and Apple brokers connections back to various application servers on behalf of my iPhone.

Regardless, of the number of connections Apple brokers back to various application servers there still only ever remains one connection from Apple to my iPhone.

I'm not convinced battery life would remain unaffected regardless of the number of applications you are receving push notifications from.

More applications definitely mean more push notifications (or at least, more data in those notifications since it's including alerts from more applications). More data to process means more CPU utilization which has a direct correlation to battery life.

This could be great for Twitter, AIM, Navigation etc... RE battery. not on 3 g yet but with 2.0 and push I see no real extra battery drain on edge. Now if I have wifi on, which I do more now with all of the apps that would suck on edge, crazy battery drain.

http://www.coreyjf.com/blog

Too bad Danger was gobbled up by Microsoft. Their push notification is what makes IMing on the Sidekick seemless and very much like the desktop version. Apple really could have benefited from a service such as Danger's.

Well... Since my "Push" service doesn't work with my MobileMe right now... I'm worried that this means nothing...

I hope gmail will take advantage of this API, I am sick of the 15 minute fetching....