[Samsung Galaxy Nexus] HarrisL:
*this is the 3G version

hi guys, first time posting here. Did the search, wasn't quite satisfied with the search results though, especially now that i have some graphs to show, I hope you guys can help me answer my questions more specifically.

I'm also a first time smartphone user, so please don't be too harsh on me :p

see, i can see how smartphones have worse battery lives with the fancy screens, fast processors and such you know, but this :

is why I decided to spend some time to make these photos and have you pros take a look at them.

That was from waking up from sleep, then playing about 3 hours of texas poker.

I didn't like that chart, and I hope you understand why.

As I said I'm a first time smartphone user, and I've been telling myself not to get TOO picky on things, but this is.....well.....let's just say not very satisfactory.

So I did some tests on how my phone does in different levels of usage.

Trial 1 : Light usage

let's say within the 19.7 hours, its around 9 hours of sleep, 7 hours of occasionally checking for notifications, 1.5 hours(most of that screen time) for whatsapp and games with light web browsing

I get 2 hours before it dies. It might not look bad because I slept during that period, but hey, what if I didn't? That extra battery used in standby mode could easily be used up in 10 mins of screen time, so its still 2hours 10mins only.

Trial 2 : Light - medium usage

No sleep in between this time, about the same amount of usage except I browsed web for a bit more it seems. This is likely the situation of a full day of work. (NOT COUNTING the transportation periods)

This seems to prove my judgement on trial 1.

Trial 3 : Extreme usage

This one is easy. Basically just leave screen on the whole time and do something with the phone during most of that time, I actually wrote down what I did with it.

- 40mins of 720p youtube videos

- 1~1.5 hrs of whatsapp

- 10~15 mins of texas poker

- 20~25 mins of words with friends

the above add up to be 2.5~3hrs, remaining screen time is from random scrolling through homescreens

Result is almost the same as the first pic shown on this thread.

Useful info :

The calling time during these test trials are insignificant to none

Version : pure ICS restored to factory settings, no additional tweaks

Brightness : Auto

Screen-on time before standby : 1 minute

Sync : both number and google mail account

Location services : I ticked the first one, letting apps track my location, and none of the other 2

I have about 5 apps and 10 games on the phone, no widgets are being used on homescreens.

So finally my questions are :

1) is this kind of battery life normal at all? (keep in mind that I'm using 3G version, none of that LTE battery killer crap)

2) what settings can I turn off to save some power? (the sync options? what are the negatives of turning those off?)

3) I read in some of my search results that there's a file related to battery stats and if I kill it I might get better battery life out of the phone? (or are there other similar tweaks I can do on the file-manipulation level?)

4) efficient way / app to help save battery without rooting? Read about a few on this site already, but it always seem like you guys still have debates on whether they are effective or not

Thanks for reading and thanks for helping!! :D