There has been a lot of confusion regarding the state of two-way Gmail syncronisation in BlackBerry Internet Service 3.0 lately, but after seeing an official forum post, it all seems to make sense now. The official knowledgebase article for BIS 3.0 had the sync nowhere in the features list, and there’s nary a sign of it in the BIS admin user interface after the EMEA launch, but the wording of that forum post indicates the the feature will be bundled into the Enhanced Gmail Plug-in – a small download that was offered awhile back to allow folks to star, archive, and label Gmail messages on their BlackBerry.
Given that the plug-in is a decidedly separate product from BIS, it makes sense that it doesn’t pop up in the KB article or admin interface. The updated plug-in should also allow you to create and delete labels right from the device, that is, if it’s running OS 4.5 or up. Strangely, the forum post also says that GIMAP (Google’s implementation, rather than regular ol’ IMAP) will need to be enabled through BIS for two-way sync to work, in which case you’d think the admin interface would show a few options somewhere, but perhaps that won’t become visible until the plug-in is publicly available. Who knows.
Early rollouts of BIS 3.0 are happily handling OpenOffice documents and WMA, however, and it should only be a matter of time before we see it land in North America. For more information about Gmail on Blackberry, hit up RIM here.