iPhone 3.0 has a lot of things going for it. MMS, cut-copy-and-paste, Find My iPhone, so on and so forth. Another big addition is Push Notifications. This system will give you notice of email and IMs without having to have the app open on your screen.

With this ability only officially making it to the Apple iPhone last week, there are still few apps out there who are taking advantage of the new feature. One of the first however is the classic instant messenger Aol Instant Messenger. If you download the new version of AIM you will have the ability to set-up the app to notify you of any IM messages that you receive while you’re connected, even if you don’t have the app open on your home screen. It can buzz, ring, display an icon or any combination of those whenever you receive a message. So now you can be on a different screen and the app will automatically notify you when a message is received.

Initial tests indicate that the response time is very good. We still haven’t heard any word on how this Push notification affects battery time or data rates, but we’ll probably find that out soon.

Hopefully this means that other apps are working push notification and background capabilities into their options.

Check out the new feature by downloading the free version or the pay version (no advertisements) of AIM.

[via TechCrunch]