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Notifications combines push notifications for Twitter, email, and any RSS feed into one iPhone app. While we have tested quite a few push notification apps in the past, including some great apps like Boxcar and GPush, none of these offer the flexibility of Notifications. While it still has a few flaws and takes a while to set up, Notifications offers a number of features other apps don't offer, including the ability to get notified of new tweets with specific keywords. The app costs $2 and is available in the App Store now.

After a bit of a delay, the GPush app (iTunes link) has finally arrived in the App Store. GPush will send you a push notification whenever a new email arrives in your inbox. The app, which costs $0.99, does one thing and one thing only: it checks your Gmail account for new messages and sends out push notifications whenever it detects new messages. Just enter your credentials and forget that you ever installed the app.

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.

Ever since Apple released iPhone OS 3.0, Twitter addicts have been waiting for their favorite iPhone application to implement the OS's new "push" technology which could deliver messages as pop-ups on the homescreen. Today, the first app to implement this feature has arrived, but it's not one of the popular apps as you may have expected. Instead, the brand-new app iTwitter (iTunes link) has beaten out all the other major clients to become the first push-enabled Twitter application for the iPhone.

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.

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.

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.

One of the most highly anticipated features coming to the new iPhone OS 3.0 is the ability for applications to deliver push notifications. Although Apple decided not to allow background processes because they drain the battery, the push notification service itself will have a persistent connection to the phone. This will permit apps to alert the user when there are any changes. These alerts will come in three varieties: badges, text alerts, and audio alerts. Text alerts appear like SMS messages, audio alerts play a sound, and badges show up on the app icon itself.

Recently, a video of instant-messaging application BeejiveIM appeared on YouTube, giving us a sneak peek of the push notification feature in action.