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Sprint started shipping Palm's entry-level Centro smartphone this fall, to mostly good reviews. Many users of the new smartphone have experienced battery life far below the 3.5 hours talk and 3 days standby time promised by Palm, however—only getting 1 to 3 hours off a single charge, in fact.

The culprit for the quick battery drains, as it turns out, isn't the device itself, but Sprint's Mobile Email application, which is provided to the operator by mob-e-mail vendor SEVEN.

You see, a continuous synchronization loop occurs when the Sprint e-mail client interacts with a the mail server and a users' password is set incorrectly or the ISP's (Internet Service Provider) isn't available.

The loop "unnecessarily keeps the device active and drains the battery until the application is removed, according Sprint's support site. There's no problem when e-mal synchronization completes successfully.

Update: A Sprint representative just informed us that Sprint already started pushing the new e-mail client, which we didn't expect for another few days, to customers already, on December 4th.

Sprint says SEVEN has created and is testing a new software client that stops the synchronization loop after five unsuccessful attempts to log into a mail server, thus preventing the loop from draining the battery.

The new Sprint Mobile Email client should be made available to Centro users by the middle of this month through PC or over-the-air download. Once notified, you get five days to download the new client, after which Sprint said it would push the update directly to users.