Developers looking for a better -- or at least a faster -- way to deliver content to end users just got a big boost from Research In Motion. Starting today, RIM is making its Push Services free to all developers.In case you didn't think your BlackBerry was receiving information fast enough, RIM has just made it faster. In the same way that its mobile email system pushes messages from its servers across the wireless networks and to end-user devices, RIM's Push Services do pretty much the same thing for other content.

Developers who want to make use of Push Services have to levels from which they can choose. The first is called BlackBerry Push Essentials. It is a free service that developers can build into their applications and allows them to push content to their customers in the blink of an eye. The second service is called BlackBerry Push Plus. This service has a free tier and paid tiers. It provides developers with notification that their push has been delivered. This lets content creators receive a digital receipt of sorts, letting them know that their content was indeed delivered.

Research In Motion explains why Push is awesome:

The BlackBerry Application Platform allows applications to run in the background and when new information is pushed to the device from the application server, that app wakes up and provides the content to the user. The app is not constantly asking servers to see if there's new info. You don't want to know the weather every 15 minutes; you want to know when it will affect you - immediately. Another plus for BlackBerry users is optimized battery life. The repeated polling for information that other "push" products require is likely to result in additional battery drain, compared to BlackBerry Push Service and could cause excessive traffic on the application's servers from constant requests.

According to RIM, users who have push-enabled apps on their BlackBerries will see little notifications pop up when new content arrives. They don't have to access it or let it interrupt when they are doing -- but they can if they want to. RIM notes that users won't have to shut down whichever app they're currently using to view the pushed content.

Push notifications can certainly be helpful, but my experience with them has been a mixed bag. Using push for the iPhone, as an example, drastically reduced battery life. It was so bad that I had to turn it off. RIM is extremely picky about battery life, so we should expect that its engineers have truly done their best to optimize Push Services.