It’s the curse of the modern smartphone: a zillion chips and sensors and a bright powerful screen and umpteen radios all sucking power from battery tech that hasn’t seen drastic improvement in the last decade. And it’s also one of the biggest Achilles’ heels of the Palm Pre and Pre Plus. It’s been a while since we last visited this area, with the Pre and Pixi having now launched onto several new networks across the world, it’s high time we revisit the land of electricity. After the break, we break it down…

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Last week, on December 17th, the BlackBerry Internet Server service had a nationwide outage for a few hours, depriving BlackBerry users across the US from getting their email (though other internet services were working fine). It was an event notable primarily because there was a lot more shoulder-shrugging than I expected – it has become par for the course that BlackBerry email goes out for some users from time to time.

It got me thinking – back when something similar happened in February, 2008, Palm had a little fun and pointed out that if you use Exchange with Windows Mobile, you don’t have to worry about a third-party point-of-failure.

What about now, though, where presumably more data gets channeled through Palm’s online cloud service, the Palm Profile?  We checked and have good news, folks: everything will pretty much work. If the Palm Profile goes down, here’s the set of things that won’t work:

• Over-the-Air backups / restoration
• First-time setup
• Remote Wipe
• App purchasing

Unlike the Sidekick, data you’re syncing to the Palm Profile is stored locally on your webOS phone. Unlike the BlackBerry, your push email happens directly via Exchange or IMAP Idle, unlike the iPhone, Palm has yet to release a push notification service so there’s nothing to go down there (yeah, that last one cuts both ways).

Of course, both the Pre and Pixi need to talk to Palm’s servers for their first-use setup, so if there’s an outage that will be a problem. Otherwise take heart – if your email or data goes down on your webOS phone, you will know exactly who to complain to – your email provider or your carrier.

Update: We totally aren’t taking credit the blame for this, but not long after we posted, sister-site CrackBerry.com is reporting that the BIS is acting up again for some North Americans, breaking the BBM service and even all data. Don’t get too cocky bragging about your service, kids — it’s not like Palm hasn’t had the occasional server problem.

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Pre Central is getting word from a tipster with a webOS emulator that the Pre is going to support IMAP IDLE. This means that users on GMail will have near instantaneous reception of new emails. That’s right, it’s getting pushed down to the phone from the GMail servers.

This is great news for Pre users. [...]

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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.

Thanks Anonymous Tipster!

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