This week has seen the long awaited release of Google Sync's Push Gmail support for the iPhone (and Windows Mobile). Google Sync has previously provided support for Google Calendar and Contacts with the iPhone through the phone's Microsoft Exchange client, but push support for Gmail was conspicuous by it's absence!
While Yahoo have had a push service for a while, there is growing concern that push notifications have been draining battery life. Google identified that as a concern when developing push for Gmail and cited their own efforts to reduce battery use:
While this type of speed is pretty awesome, push connections tend to use more power than fetching at intervals, so don't be surprised if your battery life isn't quite what it used to be. We've done a lot of work to optimize power usage, but if you prefer to save battery life, you can always turn off push in your phone's settings and fetch mail every 30 or 60 minutes instead.
It will be interesting to see how the new feature pans out. I've had it enabled for a few days now and have noticed the battery drain in addition to a couple of other quirks:
- Battery Life is now on average 1 day. This has decreased by almost 50% although unlike a Blackberry, you can turn push on/off and set custom fetch times so this is not really a problem for me
- What I assume is Google's attempt to reduce battery drain manifests itself in the service only checking for new mail and if there is any, placing a unread number with the mail icon and playing the new mail notification. This sounds sensible but when you open the mail app to read it, the app has to check all over again and plays a new mail notification once the message has been downloaded!
- It appears to notify on new mail better than it does re-sync once mail has been read. I haven't been able to read mail in a web browser and see the unread count on the iPhone mail app icon decrease afterwards. Only when you open the app and it checks again does it sort itself out (even then, occasionally it doesn't!)
There's a couple of bugs above that will no doubt be ironed out in the future, but as a first stab it's not bad. The iPhone Facebook app, for example, can't sync consistently when reading Facebook emails through a web-browser (or when switching between accounts) so maybe it's an Apple thing? And despite all that it is handy to have a audio notification go off (and as default a less intrusive one than SMS messages on the iPhone too).
The use of a Microsoft application (Microsoft Exchange) and one that's hardly cutting edge mail technology either suggests that Google aren't planning to hang around for the long term with this platform. A decision [if true] that appears sound in logic.
When Gmail was released in 2004 it was revolutionary: conversation view messaging, 1GB of storage, the famous Google search capabilities just some of the innovations that moved messaging forward. But it didn't, really. Hotmail responded by increasing the capacity of it's storage and others soon followed suit, but in terms of creative innovations to actual messaging, nothing really changed. Not until Facebook arrived and added an messaging capability to mirrored both traditional email and Google's conversation view did anything seriously adapt to Google's new benchmark.
For a while now that has left me with a feeling that perhaps traditional email and perhaps even Gmail is becoming redundant? Maybe not so for corporate world but certainly on a social level, how many of my friends who I talk to regularly are not on Facebook? [one is the answer, and he know's who he is!]. Over the past 12 months my social emailing through Gmail has plummeted! Facebook has definitely taken up that mantle; providing a service that is easy and uniform to use and can be accessed through a variety of mediums (web, mobile, iPhone, text to name a few). As 99% of my friends are on Facebook, I don't need to remember, store and maintain a list of their email addresses (although I still do, not trusting Facebook will be around forever).
Is it any surprise then that a Gmail-styled mailing application is the one that has grown and become more popular than any other over the recent years? Does this mean the end of dedicated mail providers, unable to gain such a monopoly of users as Facebook has managed? I'm not sure it does and it links nicely back to my view that Google is sitting tight on something new. Well not new as a lot of people already know about Google Wave, but new in terms of blowing everyone else out of the marketplace in one majestic swoop? (I couldn't bring myself to indulge in wave puns!)
At first I didn't really understand Google Wave. I think under examination I probably would still fail a 'Google Wave Comprehension Exercise'. The demo's, screen shots and reviews all give me the impression that it is just too busy an interface for you to get a handle on what's happening. I like to be able to 'see the bigger picture' and other clichés that mean 'to take perspectives that aren't spoon fed to you!' The more I look at it though, I'm more convinced it can cater for these desires and also deliver on the obvious benefits it will bring. I've long advocated using messaging services such as Skype or even MSN Messenger in business, arguing that it would free up Email to be exactly that: Electronic Mail. Google Wave would allow people to use it as both an electronic mail solution and a chat-based solution as it has been designed to do that. Microsoft Outlook and the host of traditional mail providers were not designed to handle chats (a post for another rainy day!).
So are Google holding back on their development of services that involve major use of Microsoft Exchange on the iPhone in order to pave the way for Wave, or are they simply reluctant to use Microsoft technology to facilitate their innovations? In a wider context than just the iPhone, will Google Wave end the old-style mail communication format, or will us end users reject such radical change?
Google Sync's Push Gmail could well be the last hurrah for an antiquated way of electronic communication. It saddens me a little to admit I'm really quite excited by that prospect!
