Does push drain battery or prolong it?

[Stalban]

I always assumed that the point of push services was to stop the phone from having to check servers at periodic intervals, therefore saving battery. However people seem to be saying that to save battery you should turn push services off.

At the moment i'm just using the normal IMAP gmail service which is fine for my purposes but i've also set up a nuevasync with my google calendar and they offer push functionality which could be quite helpful. However battery life is bad enough as it is and i'd like to prolong as best i can.

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[know-it-all5]

push is bad for battery, if you are constantly receiving email, say more than 25 per day. It is good for battery if you receive more moderate amounts of email, because it no longer pointlessly checks for email, and uses up battery.

I get about 20 emails pushed to my iphone each day and my battery is better with it turned on then having it fetch emails at intervals during the day.

 

[bluenoise]

I thought the reason push uses more power is because it needs to maintain a constant connection in order to receive the notification whereas fetch only makes a connection periodically to check for new mail, calendar events, etc.