On Palringo's battery life - I've found it to be superb. If you think Palringo is bad, run Beejive for a few, you'll realize how good Palringo really is.

If you're running a push e-mail solution like SEVEN which keeps your data connection up all of the time anyway, Palringo really doesn't cause that much of an additional drain. It's just the continued polling for messages that causes the increased drain.