Many mobile Web users of BlackBerry devotion have long known that push mail is something just shy of heavenly in convenience. And so it is something that Apple was fairly quick to say would arrive on the iPhone. Enterprise users could mate the device with their corporate exchange server and have immediate access to email, calendar, etc., and all changes would quickly synchronize. Months later, Apple announced its intention to bring push to the consumer sector, too, through the .Mac replacement known as MobileMe.
Forward to today, and MobileMe has been seen roughing the public waters for several weeks, and doing so with some major hiccups. Yet, even after Apple had announced having remedied faults in email transmission late last month - at which point I sprang for a free 30-day trial of the service - problems have evidently persisted. Email simply would not “push” to my device. At least not in any way that would seem reasonably expedient. (Hours upon hours, let’s say.) Suffice it to say, I abandoned the effort in a few days’ time.
I should note, other components in MobileMe did transfer information as advertised. Contacts added through my iPhone would move to the cloud automatically with little delay, for instance. But I assume for the broad majority of prospective subscribers, mail would be the singular most important aspect of the $99 investment. And it has underperformed, plain and simple.
I would venture to think Apple will right all problems in coming months, and according to a relatively fresh MacRumors report, the company "has pulled the push notification service in (the latest developer-specific iPhone 2.1 Beta 4 software) release ‘for further development,’” proving that hypothesis to be very probable. (MacRumor’s Jeff Longo notes that third party developers have issued requests for “background process support” of push transfers for their applications, and that this notice likely promises such an enhancement at the SDK level.)