Push Pull to/from the cloud!

I don't know about you, folks, who rushed and updated to 2.0 or happen to have put your arms around the new gottahavit 3G. I have been trying what they said in the demo (no manuals read yet), especially about the push-pull to 'n from the cloud of emails, contacts and calendar events.

Here's what's happening to me:

Mail push to both laptops/desktops and iPhones/iPodTouch seems to be working, somehow. Receive a mail on your mobile.me account and it appears on Pods and laptops pretty quick. On the mobile device it will still show on the 'home' icon even if the mail app is closed. On a laptop though, it will only show on the dock icon if you happen to have the mail client up and running (albeit inactive). It won't show when the mail client is not launched. Good to know.

For calendars and contacts, again, the mobile devices appear to behave properly... New events and/or changes in calendars and contacts seems to work and sync in secs. But, it's even worse than the mail clients with those client laptop apps of Calendars and Contacts. Nothing happens in secs like John from the Applestore claims in the guide video of mobile.me. You gotta launch (force) an iSync before anything happens. Even if you specified automatic updates in the iSync prefs. That's what I found out. What's the use of automatic updates then? Search me...

Now, if you decide to abandon all your local client apps (mail, calendars and contacts), and use the mobile.me web apps instead, everything indeed happens in secs. It seems that the Apple mobile devices (iPhone and iPodTouch) actually do what people expect them to do, having listened to what John said. Anything you do on a mobile device, from the moment you hit 'done' it's pushed into the cloud and updates your cloud server data. Therefore, updates of your data are instantaneously visible when you use the web apps (which actually read and write that cloud data by design). On laptops though, you need to force an update via iSync (even when you specified 'Automatic' updates in your prefs, as I mentioned earlier) to make your local apps show the same contact data and calendar events as in the cloud and on your mobile devices.

That's what I experienced, after a few tests. I don't know about you, but if you think I am wrong and I forget something, respond to my twits @vkritis.

Good push-pulling kids...