[Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note II] joshm.1219:
It's been largely evidenced by the "smart-guy" tech sites such as anandtech that usage and location have so much effect and are so varied user-to-user that software and processor tweaks to save battery life are going to be minimal when you look it at across the board. Even this new processor system just released by Motorola may or may not make a difference, we will find out as more research can be done. Basically if the "contextual" and "natural-language" processors are just being used to turn on the main application processors when they are needed or if their actually processing and communicating with the software completely separate from the application processors is a big difference as to how much battery specialized core-task setups actually save. Little things like these simply make efficiency something very varying when you look at it big picture.

Basically, there's only two surefire things you can do with these devices to dramatically extend battery life. Run a really light OS like iOS or throw as much battery cells in the thing as you can. The LG G2's 3000 mah battery uses the advantages of Lithium Polymer to create a stepped battery (seen in the HTC 8X and Moto X in the way they set the board behind the battery) that has a small rectangular shaped set of battery cells over a larger one. It fits nicer in the hand and adds precious cells.

What I want to see in a new phone? Screen-wise I could give a crap about 1080p personally, I'm making a screen sacrifice already looking at something that's 5~ inches, if I want super-quality I'll use my retinaMBP. So for the small battery difference 720p makes, I'll take it. I like the idea of active notifications in the new Moto X, something I can see getting added to AOSP in the future, but it only works with OLED (LCD has to turn on all of it's pixels at once, OLED doesn't) and up until now I haven't seen OLED in the sunlight. Literally. I don't want have to cover my phone with one hand to be able to see it outside, I'd rather just have a high-nit LCD.

Processor-wise, Qualcomm is pretty much it. The only other two companies with full architecture licenses from ARM are Apple and Samsung (recently upgraded). Obviously I don't want iOS and while I like Samsung, Exynos has proven a lesser competitor to Snapdragon. Classic example of a focused company doing one thing great vs. a thousand things pretty good. So with that, I want a 400. I don't need quad-cores because I don't really play phone games. There's no other reason to have it. 800 vs 600 is just that 800 is more power you're not using compared to the amount of power you're not using in a 600, they both just unnecessarily eat more and more battery. There's lots of advantages of going from A9 to A15 (and I'm so excited for A57!) so that's why I'd be really happy with the 400.

Software-wise I'm going to root whatever I get (like any of us of course) because I need as much customizability as possible.

The only new camera tech that really excites me is the Lumia 1020's (from the 808 PureView). I'd love to be able to take a 41-megapixel picture for the lossless post-photo digital zoom. Insane possibilities with that.

Also IR should've stayed in phones, don't know why it didn't.