[Galaxy S II General] thompps:
<shamed> - sorry for long post!!! :)

@ OP - you had a few minutes under 3hrs of charging. That is in excess of a full charge of the battery! And a total screen of a a few hours.. Nothing impressive at all. Saying you had on GPS and screen on full brightness negates the charging is just silly. It is usage, and usage is what we're interested in. :o

@ mittaa + Zedwings: Completely agree with both. Even display on (IMO the most accurate comparison) is a long way from the full truth for comparison in testing and a very fixed test environment would be needed to test a pattern of usage. I started to think about this like mitaa suggests (and when you do, you realise it is virtually impossible to co-ordinate without resetting back to factory) and there are still variables.

And anyway, it's kind of irrelevant at that point. You wouldn't consider doing it unless you're battery life is not meeting your hopes or needs. but your usage is your usage and you'll be happy or not.

Unless you are prepared to compromise on screen time, game playing, widgets, sync settings, live wallpaper etc, then what does it matter? You must find the balance between battery life and customisation that YOU can live with.

Personally, I do this by running my phone in 'full fat' mode. All radios on (this inc. GPS), synch on full, screen set to about 75% (no auto), the widgets I want, high spec live wallpaper (like Galaxies!) that make my £500 phone look like a £500 phone. I settle into my daily usage pattern, charging whenever I need to charge. This is why I bought my phone, not to immediately turn everything off and play the 'longest, littlest' game! :D

After about two weeks and this has settled into a fairly regular pattern, I start to switch off the things that mean least to me, one by one, day by day until after a numbers of days I find the balance that I can live with.

Personally I start with turning into perm 2G mode as I have wi-fi almost everywhere I go and I live in an area where 2G and 3G is on the cusp. This is extremely draining to batteries (I deal with none phone GSM equipment every day where battery life is key) and I know signal stregnth on the band you're using, constantly cylcing between band (and the variance in antenna power) is the single biggest thing to affect battery life asside from screen. It may not reflect this in stats, but trust me on this... If I lived and worked in a strong signal area, it would drop a few places down the list, extra call quality is nice as well as data.

For those of you living and working in London for example, but mostly out and away from Wi-fi, then consider leaving 3G on, and turning Wi-fi off.

Wi-fi scanning for networks constantly is another big drain.I have noticed this about Android, it allows you background apps to work leaner than the iPhone in power consumption when you have lots of widgets and synch etc. However the iPhone actually uses GSM to perform background tasks when the phone is off (shutting down wi-fi radio which reconnects as soon as you unlock the screen). This means that if you're out and away from a friendly hotspot all day, battery is less affected than an android.

Anyway, sorry for the long post, but hope you all have luck in finding your 'sweet spot' in usage / customisation.

Peter