Back in June last year Apple announced a replacement to its .Mac service called MobileMe, which would supposedly bring (among other things) push mail capabilities to the iPhone. The cloud service seemed promising, at least on paper, but unfortunately the transition was plagued with mishaps that went from frequent outages to lost email messages.
Apple gradually began sorting out the issues but still opted to avoid associating the term "push" with MobileMe until they could get synchronization between devices down to acceptable times. According to an official email sent out the MobileMe subscribers, however, the push notifications feature has finally arrived back along with other new features.
Apple says that changes you make to contacts and calendars on your Mac or PC are now automatically pushed up to the cloud every time you make an update. Likewise, changes you make on me.com, iPhone, or iPod touch are automatically pushed to your Mac or PC. The company also touted an iDisk file sharing feature, which was actually unveiled earlier this month, and rounded out the announcements by promising improved iPhone notification and syncing and better web app performance.