I've been trying for months now, to find out what's eating my battery. The usual tip-off will be that the phone is HOT in my pocket, and when I look, the battery is being eaten alive, like a 2-3 hour life from fully charged.

The battery is genuine, and good, and sometimes runs nearly 24 hours without any complaint.

There's no reason to suspect malware, I scan the phone, run Lookout, and don't grab apps from the Darknet.

But when I look at what apps are running...there's nothing unusual. I kill apps, I uninstall apps...nothing seems to stand out as a problem. Except, I've noticed, I often use Google Maps (which sometimes is psychotic, it will tell me to "continue North then make a left" when in fact I've been traveling SOUTH and the turn will be to the RIGHT, or it will say to continue south then make a U-turn and go north, when I've been traveling north all along) and I suspect that invokes Google Play Services. The only hog I can see on the battery sub-menu is that Google Services are using a lot of power, when nothing else appears to be. And this is going on for maybe 9 months now, with updates of everything including the Google core service apps on the phone.

I've turned off Wifi and Bluetooth and GPS, and even NFC, and no, turning them off doesn't stop the drain either, so it isn't "just one of the radios" sucking power.

The back of the phone, especially lower back of the phone, is what feels HOT in my pocket when this happens.

Are these phones simply flawed in the Android OS version? (Latest/last AT&T FOTA upgrade running.)

Or does anyone have a clue?