Palm Pre Gmail and IMAP: Pushes with IMAP IDLE

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We've just confirmed via an anonymous tipster with an emulator that the Palm Pre does, in fact, fully support IMAP IDLE on Gmail. What on earth does that mean? It means that if you're using Gmail, your email gets pushed out to your Pre nearly instantly. So says our tipster:

It actually comes in faster than my blackberry.

This, friends, is stupendous news. We strongly suspect that any IMAP email account with IDLE support will push to the Palm Pre.

The backstory, for those that are curious, is that IMAP IDLE is a sort of push system that isn't nearly as robust as either BlackBerry's system or Exchange Active Sync, but gets the job done. Longtime Treo faithful will fondly recall (and currently fondly use) ChatterEmail, a PalmOS email client that does a great job supporting IMAP IDLE push. The developer of ChatterEmail worked at Palm for a time and, as we dearly hoped, he apparently spent his time there teaching Palm how to properly implement IMAP IDLE for push.

via precentral