When I saw this headline on BerryReview, I nearly flipped. It was over a year ago that we debated pushing your Gmail vs. the Gmail BlackBerry app, and the debate rages on through today. But to add push email to the application would completely change the game. In fact, if not for the message integration issue, I’d say that the app would win convincingly. However, there’s a bit caveat to all this: it’s not free. Boooo. Yeah, it’d be nice to have a push version of the Gmail app, but it looks like you’ll have to pony up for the privilege. Details after the jump.
The upgrade is only available for users of Google Apps Premier Edition and Education Edition users. Why they’re limiting it to paying customers (as if!), we’re not quite certain. We can only hope that it’s coming at some point in the future to us freeloaders.
Actually, scratch that. It’s not all we can hope for. As Ronen notes, what we can really hope for is Google and RIM working together to create a two-way sync for Gmail. That’s probably the biggest kink in the system, and it can get quite annoying to someone who receives hundreds of emails per day on Gmail (no, I’m not popular, just have long conversations via email). However, as we see in the comments to our Gmail post, some people like the lack of sync. I think, however, that they are outnumbered.
You can check out Google Apps Premier Edition here. Looks like it costs $50/year. Probably not worth it for most, but perhaps some will like the functionality enough to fork over the dough. The rest of us will just wait, twiddling our thumbs, for two-way sync over BIS.
