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"3.0 for iPhone is finally in the App Store - enjoy!"

I saw that tweet last night from the BeeJive IM team and hit the iTunes store immediately to update. Push Notifications are the one feature it seems like everyone has really been waiting for and even moreso in the IM world. Truth be told, it works exactly as advertised. When you drop off BeeJive (after enabling Push Notifications, of course), your phone will continue to alert you of incoming messages with a sound, badge, or vibration, or all three if you set it up that way in your settings.

The one concern was how fast this whole process would work. After you quit BeeJive, the phone will push an update to you. You click the update and the app reloads and puts you back in the conversation. Round trip? Barely noticeable. I guess this is the reason it took so long to get these apps in the App Store; they wanted to make sure they worked as advertised. So far it's pretty obvious that all that work paid off and the BeeJive team and Apple's iPhone folks should get a small pat on the back for finally getting over the hurdle.

If your IM needs are limited to AIM, AOL released the new version of AIM that supports Push Notifications also. The general buzz is that it works equally flawlessly. You can pick up either of these guys in the App Store. My recommendation? Jump to BeeJive if you need more than AIM access or if you need to juggle multiple AIM accounts.

Anyone else take a crack at these two? Share your thoughts!

Let's face it; this is the one thing most of us were waiting for the longest and with breath most baited. Since Apple seems dead-set against background applications, this is as good as it's going to get if you don't want to jailbreak your phone. I've always hated the idea of bouncing a notification off a third party server, but there are certain advantages to the app not running. While I think they exaggerated the battery life hit of a background application, this definitely does save battery life.

It'll be nice to have an IM application that can "stay running" when closed, too. Currently, BeeJive does a good job of this by pusing MobileMe e-mails to your phone when a notification comes in and you're offline, but that's less than ideal. In the implementations shown by ESPN and Meebo, you can really see that this does have a lot of potential despite its potential shortcomings.

I'm taking a wait and see on this one with the hope that it's as good as it can be rather than as big a disaster as the devil on my shoulder is telling me it will be. I just hope it was worth the extended wait.

That's it for our iPhone 3.0 announcement coverage. There was a lot of other small stuff announced that we didn't cover, but I think we covered the most important features. Jeff and I will have our thoughts on 3.0 and what it means for users tomorrow. Thanks for reading!