Push GMail and Battery Life

[Stigy]

I have been searching around to see if I can find a definitive answer to this question, but no one seems to answer it directly.

I have 2 domains running Google Apps and my one GMail account so that means I have 3 accounts pushing GMail to my Droid. Only the GMail account pushes calendar and contacts though.

Am I killing the battery by having 3 accounts push to the device or is push GMail battery friendly?

I have seen a decline in battery life lately, but not sure exactly what is causing this.

Thanks in advance.

 

[durrell]

Push should be the least drain on your battery, as far as I know. I highly doubt it's stressing your battery as much as it would if you had it set to fetch every 30 minutes or so.

Edit: To explain it better, fetch has to open a connection to the server, check for updates, and then close. Push is actually a SMS message sent from the Exchange server notifying the phone that there is a new message, and then the client opens a connection to receive the new message. So, I suppose depending on the amount of e-mail you're getting, one could be better than the other. If you're getting multiple e-mails throughout the day it would probably be better to use "fetch" every 30 minutes, whereas if you're only receiving a few e-mails a day it would definitely be better to use push.

At least that's how I understand it.

Edit 2: I take that back.

This is how recent Exchange push works:

1. A connection is made between the device and server.
2. This connection is kept open between the two, but this does not mean that data is being transmitted
3. If new email comes into the server, the server will notify the device that it needs to sync.
4. If no new email comes in, the device will re-establish the connection (by default, every 15 minutes).
5. During that 15 minute interval, if no new email comes into the server, nothing is being transmitted between the device and server.

So it sounds like push is equivalent to fetch every 15 minutes. So yes, it could hinder battery life.