Battery usage on the Zoomer using the Serial port: I have made measurements of the current drawn from the batteries during usage of the serial port. It ranges from 1.5-2X of the Display Refresh current and 5-6X of the "Resting Current". Hence, the batteries do drain faster depending on how much you use the serial port. (See HWR tips and other technotes in the Palm Forum in the Company Support folder of this forum or use Keyword PALM)
"Discarding of text" in a Notebook page: There is a finite limit to the length of a Notebook page: For ink, the limit is 4K line segments -- Not something you can easily measure. You'll have to experiment with your own handwriting to judge how much will be stored on a page. Text limit is about 130-150 lines of text. Exceeding the limits will cause the excess to "disappear".
There is no way to make a drawing larger than the actual screen width or scrollable length. There is no horizontal scrolling.
Running PalmConnect from uncompressed partition of compressed disk: While true that Palmconnect must run in an uncompressed partition of your disk, it really only takes up about 2.5 mb when it's not launched, eg. when you're running a Windows app. It may use some additional disk space for swap/spool when launched. AOL uses a different version of Geos and some additional code and seems to run successfully on a compressed disk. Palm is already addressing this situation, so hang in there.