[Nexus 5X General] jimv1983:
First off I totally agree with what you are saying about fixing battery draining abnormalities. However I do disagree with saying that a battery that drains in around 10 hours with 2 hours SoT wouldn't have considerably better battery life with a 50% increase in battery size. Oh course it would. Sure those holes should be fixed but that isn't always an option and when it isn't a large battery you feel the impact much more. Take my example of my Nexus 5 with its wifi drain bug. Since the phone never went to sleep on my work wifi the battery drained pretty fast but if that phone had had a 3,000mAh battery(or bigger) instead of its pathetically tiny 2,300mAh battery it would have taken a while longer to drain.

Of course we need to patch the holes but that doesn't change the fact that putting more water in the bucket would result in it taking longer for the bucket to be empty.

I think you mentioned in an earlier comment that when cores aren't needed they shut down. If the 808 could handle the Phone Arena video test with only 2 A57 cores then do you think the 810 would have to have all 4 of its A57 cores on to run the same test? Maybe but I wouldn't expect that. As far as the more power hungry GPU in the Nexus 6P you have a point but that is mainly due to the fact that the Nexus 6P is rendering 78% more pixels. If everything you have said so far has been correct than even with a little more power used by the SoC and GPU on the Nexus 6P a 28% bigger battery should have lasted longer than the Nexus 5X even if only by 30-60 minutes.

You talk about if battery life is already decent but the fact is that in most cases it isn't decent. The Nexus 5X is entering deep sleep during non-use just fine for most people. It's the usage that takes so much power(as expected). Whether it's the screen, SoC, cell signal, etc. It all takes power. Smartphones are doing more and more and using more and more power but the battery capacity isn't keeping up.

My Nexus 5X today has been doing great on stand by time so it would seem like there are no "holes in my bucket"(at least not large ones). However, after 10 hours off the charger my phone is sitting at 70% with only 45 minutes of SOT on wifi all but 30 minutes(during my commute) and ~20% screen brightness with only some Facebook and browsing(with Chrome) and great cell signal. During the 9 hours 15 minutes my phone hasn't been in use it has been in deep sleep most of the time(unless the "Awake" bar in the battery details screen is wrong). If I were to go by my average sleeping drain rate of about 1/3% per hour and I hadn't turned on the screen once during the day then my phone would be around 97%. That means that 45 minutes of actual usage of things that shouldn't be using an excessive amount of battery(no games, no GPS, almost no mobile data, dim screen, no calls, no Bluetooth activity) has drained the battery 17%. That is a drain rate during usage of about 22% per hour or about 4.5 hours of constant usage if I took it off the charger and used it until it died. That also matches with the battery draining 1% every ~2.5 minutes while browsing.

If browsing for less than 3 minutes on wifi with great cell signal and low brightness(~20%) resulting in a 1% drop of battery meets your definition of decent than we have a very VERY different opinion of what decent battery life means. The fact is that for the hardware of current phones the batteries are just too damn small even if the "bucket" doesn't have any holes.

Last September I went to an all day festival concert with like 25 bands. I had my Nexus 5. I unplugged at 100% at 9am. During the day I used the phone heavily. I was on mobile data the entire time since the concert was in the middle of park. Signal was decent but not great. I was taking pictures, posting on Facebook, used GPS(to get there), played some games(a few bands I didn't care about so I had time to burn), texting, some calls, high brightness in some situations because of the sun, browsing(again, some bands I didn't care for). I didn't get back to an outlet until 1am. That is 16 hours off charger with probably 5 hours of heavy usage. If I hadn't brought my external battery pack(which was annoying as hell to have in my pocket all day) my battery would have been dead by like 4pm. The Nexus 5X might have made it to like 7pm or 8pm. I want a phone that gets me thought that type of day and still have like 20% left(remember, dropping below 20% has a negative impact on the total lifetime of the battery). When a phone is capable of doing that THEN and ONLY then will I call the battery life good.