We introduced the feature in Palringo for iPhone 1.2 to cater for the lack of background application support and we absolutely love the feedback we received from you!

Sure, we only kept you online for five minutes, but that was more than enough if you needed to quickly check your emails, respond to a phone call or a text without being disconnected and losing any messages that would have been sent during that time.

We opted to go for five minutes to begin with, so we could test whether our servers could handle persistent connections properly and estimate what sort of load our numerous iPhone users would add to the Palringo server.

Well the good news are that :

1. Everything is working as expected and…
2. As of today, we’ve increased the amount of time to 10 minutes!

You can keep an eye on how long the Palringo server keeps you connected by following the following thread on the Palringo forums, which will be updated accordingly:

http://forum.palringo.com/showthread.php?t=1273

No push notifications?

One reason for persistent connections is, obviously, keep you connected in the background, but let’s not forget the ultimate goal : Push Notifications.

By increasing the time we keep your accounts online on the Palringo servers, we’ll be able to notify you of new messages via the Push Notification service.

We are a bit disappointed that Push Notifications didn’t make it into Firmware 2.1; we understand Apple has good reasons for delaying the service and want to get it right.

In any case, whenever Apple’s ready, we’re ready.