what is a baseline for GOOD battery life? I've seen Earlymon make the case that what our phones do compared to a laptop is pretty amazing but we expect our phones to have 10x time better battery life.
I would submit that we're not driving anywhere near the display size or a hard drive. And there's a big difference in battery sizes.
I get about 5 hours of hard use (by any measure) from a laptop.
I expect moderate use of a phone to exceed a day, and moderate / heavy to last nearly a day.
I agree that moderate and heavy are strictly subjective, but I take the same position as the Supreme Court did on porn - I know it when I see it.
Social networking syncing is a battery hog. So are instant messaging apps. It's tempting to have an instant messenger running and have no messages go in or out, and call that low use (because the observer saw no action) but that's not true. And that's an architectural issue beyond Android - but the phone is always blamed.
Were we to see improvement in push technology for all areas of weather, stocks, mail, messaging, social stuff, etc etc, we might more quickly agree on these definitions of use. Too many apps work in processor and network intensive loops seeing if new information is available to be pulled in, and these are the battery hogs.
Let me put it this way.
If you run nothing, just idle, you can do it for a very long time, yet never miss an incoming call, or SMS.
That is an example of perfected push technology.
Other apps need to behave like that.