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According to Dominik Balogh, the developer of a push-enabled "to do" list application for iPhone called NotifyMe, the Push Notification technology provided by Apple does not appear to be working on any "unlocked" iPhones. Unlocked phones are those that have been modified to work on unsupported carriers. For example, in the U.S., this would mean phones that were hacked to work on T-Mobile's network instead of on AT&T. This is different than "jailbroken" phones, which are phones modified to allow the installation of unapproved third-party applications.

At first, you might dismiss this problem since it only affects a small subset of users, but Balogh brings up an important question: "what should the developers do?" People who have purchased his application are now angry that it doesn't work, yet there's nothing he can do to help them.

Earlier this year, we reviewed reQall, a very smart task manager, organizer, and 'memory tool' for the iPhone and BlackBerry. It combines a calendar, integration with Outlook and Google Calendar (in the paid version for $2.99 a month), and to-do list functions with a surprisingly useful 'Memory Jogger' feature that brings up reminders depending on the time of the day, date, and a user's location. When we reviewed the app, we noted that it was already a very interesting product, but that it would surely benefit from the iPhone 3.0 release with push notifications, and today this new release for the iPhone 3.0 operating system has finally arrived.

When Apple launched the iPhone 3.0 update, we were pretty excited about a number of the new features in the OS, but push notifications, which Apple billed as an alternative to battery-draining background processes, were on the top of our list. After a few weeks with the iPhone 3.0 OS, however, only a very small number of push apps have made it into the store, and even some of the best ones, like BeeJive IM (iTunes link) and the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) suffer from major drawbacks.

Apple has always had a tendency to hype up its statements about the speed of its devices by using just the right benchmarks and just the right products to compare them to. When it comes to the iPhone 3GS and the iPhone 3.0 update, however, it looks like Apple might actually have understated some of the speed gains it advertised. Medialets, a mobile advertising and analytics company, ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark on the iPhone 3G with the old and new OS versions, as well as on the 3GS. In Medialets' tests, the speed of the iPhone 3G with the 3.0 almost tripled, and the new iPhone 3GS is another 3 times faster in completing the SunSpider benchmark than the 3G with the 3.0 release.

Now that iPhone's new OS 3.0 is available with all its nifty features like spotlight search, copy and paste, push notifications and maybe one day MMS and tethering, many users have happily upgraded their devices. For most people, upgrading to the new OS is as technical as they want to get. For others, however, a true upgrade isn't complete until the jailbreak is done.

After waiting for a few days, the fabulous iPhone dev team at last provided us with a new set of jailbreaking tools. If you're ready to dive in, you can use this guide to get going. And unlike some of the other guides on the net, we'll share our personal experience and tips so you know just what you're getting into...and what to avoid.

Just this morning, our own Sarah Perez wondered if Apple wasn't ready for push notifications yet, as only a few push enabled apps had made it into the App Store so far, but as is so often the case in our business, only a few hours later Apple first allows the AIM instant messenger (iTunes link) into the store, and now BeejiveIM (iTunes link), a multi-network IM app that was extensively demoed at Apple's developer conference two weeks ago, has also arrived in the App Store as well. We are still waiting for a number of other apps with support for push to be allowed into the store, but it clearly looks like Apple has now opened the floodgates and more apps will probably follow soon.

If you're wondering where all the Push Notification-enabled iPhone apps are, you're not alone. Many of the most highly anticipated applications designed to work in iPhone's OS 3.0 have not yet had their updated versions approved. On the list of overdue apps are AIM, IM+, Beejive IM, and ESPN ScoreCenter to name a few. And who knows how many lesser-known and brand-new applications are still sitting in limbo!

So what's the reason for the delay? One iPhone application developer has his suspicions. He's discovered what appears to be an issue with Apple's Feedback service and is now questioning if this, and not the backlog of new app approvals, is what's causing the holdup.

Even though the iPhone 3.0 OS update went out successfully yesterday, the #1 feature many users were still waiting for was the ability to receive push notifications. While a couple of apps had already been updated with this functionality over the last few days (Zillow, AP Mobile, Weather Alert, etc.), no push notifications went out yesterday. Only this morning, around 10am, did Apple enable push notifications and the first alert went out to the AP Mobile app.

After thinking about how Apple has implemented notifications, however, we think that while this is a great feature, there are a couple of areas where we would like to see some changes.

When Apple announced the new 3.0 version of its iPhone operating system last week, the company focused on a number of major additions to the phone's bag of tricks: cut, copy, and paste; push notifications; new features for Safari; MMS; the ability to use the keyboard in landscape mode in Apple's apps like Mail, Notes, and Messages; as well as the new Spotlight search. All of these are important updates, but Apple also made a number of smaller updates to the firmware that it didn't stress at WWDC, including better scrubbing controls in the iPod app, new features for playing back podcasts, and the ability to sign in to YouTube to sync bookmarks and easily find and play your own videos.

In this post, we will have a closer look at the updates that are coming to the iPhone tomorrow, with a special focus on some of the features that Apple hasn't talked about much yet.