I was about to ditch my Incredible with it's hilariously bad battery life until I rooted it. I can probably get 2 days out of it now. My Nexus One had great battery life. It's the software. Not saying it's an excuse (they put the OS on there) or that this is palatable for the average person, but the hardware is solid.
EDIT: To add to this, it's likely Verizon's fault for the Incredible's battery life, because they require the vendors to install terrible, low quality applications & system extensions that can't be uninstalled from the phone.
I've had the same experience with my Incredible. The fact that CyanogenMod 7 is Android 2.3 based, while there isn't an official Gingerbread ROM for the phone, is probably also a factor.
I had a pretty sweet extended battery for my Incredible thing lasted for well over a day with heavy voice and data usage. Sure it's not a fix from the manufacturer, but it worked out pretty well.
I've never had the spare money to buy a smartphone, but isn't that /ludicrously/ low? My cheap little nokia brick lasts (under normal usage) for a bit less than a week. Admittedly, the power drawn is not comparable, but I'd still think the manufacturers would try to give the users a somewhat longer battery life.
It's not comparable at all. Every smartphone I've had (Palm Treo, Nokia, iPhone 3G, and now Droid X) has needed daily charging. The Droid is down to ~50-60% battery by the end of the day, unless I'm on the phone a lot. It's not a PITA to plug it in before I go to sleep.
These things are full-on computers, in your pocket. Woot!
Not really, no. I had one of the original iPhones and with heavy 3G usage the battery drains like nobody's business (it barely lasted half a day if I used it to stream music on the train to work). Right now I have a HTC Dream (also known as the G1) which lasts slightly over a day. Newer iPhones and Androids seem to last a bit longer, but not much. Its the price you pay for internet connectivity...
Newer phones are almost all battery with just a sliver for a motherboard. The iPhone4 in particular uses a microsim because they, physically, do not have the space for a larger sim.[1]
I'm also getting great use out of it, the battery lasts 2.5 days with moderate usage. Which is something I haven't been able to do with a Verizon Droid Incredible.
Calling it a phone is very misleading. It has a lot more in common with a laptop than a phone, and imagine how thrilled you'd be if your laptop battery could last all day.
I stream Pandora/Rhapsody at the gym in the morning, watch tv shows movies (transcoded for android), read email, rss, run python scripts at night to copy off my pictures, run locale to automatically adjust my ringer volume for work, etc, etc, etc.
A cell phone is not even close to a the computer that is the android phone.
A better comparison is a laptop.
And like a laptop, a lot of power is going to the fancy screen.
However, I get a couple of days out of mine with cyanogen + extended battery.
