Great discovery by Katie Floyd, one half of the Mac Power Users Podcast on the mysterious battery drain of new iPads:
After additional investigation I discovered the iPad was consuming power normally when active, but was draining more power than expected when in sleep or standby mode. What was the cause? In my case, I’ve narrowed it down to Ping, Apple’s nearly forgotten “social network for music.” Like all good Apple geeks I checked out Ping when it was first introduced and setup an account, but I haven’t touched it since. Nevertheless, it seems that the Ping service will regularly check in with Apple’s servers in the background. I’m never going to use Ping, so it was time to disable it, though figuring out how to do so isn’t exactly straightforward.
Read the rest of Katie’s post here