iPhone auto configures Gmail - almost too smart
I got an iPhone this weekend. It did something that kind of freaks me out.
It saw I had a Gmail account under POP3 in Mail.app on my Mac, so it set up the same account on the iPhone. Using IMAP.
It recognized that my address is Gmail, and knew what settings to use for IMAP instead of POP3. I googled, and confirmed this was a recent feature Apple included, just for Gmail.
One of the interesting things I’ve been seeing with the iPhone is how Apple seems to be really letting reality guide its products. A lot of techies get a little lost in building elegant, everything-agnostic systems that in theory could do a job perfectly if the planets aligned. Apple has really taken the other approach and made some concrete, real-world decisions to help its users (no small portion of which are on Gmail, no doubt.) For another example, see the Push service they’ve implemented that lets third party apps ping your iPhone. It wasn’t part of the original design, but they saw the need and just filled it, without re-architecting a ton of stuff.
