March 17, 2009 2:31 PM PDT
The push notification feature that was supposed to appear in September of last year will finally be making its way to phones in version 3.0. Forstall notes that Apple had been late on this, and blamed the delay on scaling, saying that the original system was too taxing on both the handset's battery and its processing power.
The new system works just like the old one, but has been optimized for over-the-air data transfer. It still relies on Apple's servers as a go-between to send audio alerts, text messages, and badge notifications. Users still have to fire up the application to get at the data, though.
Photo by James Martin/CNET
Caption by staff
