I put my iPad to sleep to save battery more than for any other reason. I often find that not only do I prefer it making noise, but I've grown to rely on it to let me know if somebody sent me something that I might need to respond to.

Of course, I have different use patterns than the author I guess. I do everything I can to get the least amount of mail, for one. In lieu of just dealing with a lot of mail and getting upset when I'm notified of it, I prefer to limit the amount of mail I get by limiting newsletters and the like the I subscribe to.

I suppose if he's more famous than myself, that might be more difficult, but I think I'd try to work on a high-volume /public mail account that wasn't auto-polling in order to keep my personal/low-volume email account more usable.

My iPad also sleeps in a different room than me, so that might be the biggest difference maker.

I think Android's solution solves his particular problem better (but is suboptimal in perhaps other ways) in that it only dings on the first notification of each event type. I'll get a ding for 1 unread email, but the second and _n_ after emails don't bother me until I've checked and cleared the active alerts.