I'm sure that same mobile telephone was capable of far less than a smartphone. I remember my Nokias being able to last for days on end (unless I played a lot of Snake!)
While I wouldn't trade my current smartphone for one of those, I do miss the lack of battery anxiety, and wish the manufacturers would make models for those of us who aren't obsessed with thinness. An iPhone 6 at 5/8" (15mm) would be awesome.
Nope, it's just bad software engineers. Africa has those pretty very battery friendly "smart phones" and they do everything that yours does, probably without the fancy games.
I've been tweaking my Android tablet's code (10" screen), profiling, setting up all of the possible GPU optimizations (whole UI is whenever possible displayed using it) and this is the result.
While that is pretty awesome, and I've played with Android tweaks to get better battery life in the past, the software doesn't seem like the biggest consumer of power. These days I generally I see >80% of battery power being used by the screen, so no matter how well optimized the software/cpu/gpu is, actually using the device is going to kill the battery.
Added: With Timur's Kernel and some rtc/wakeup/governer tweaks I can get at least 2 weeks on my nexus7.
Africa's "smart phones" (whatever that means) are usually a feature-phone with a web browser. Much less capable than a smartphone
Turn off wifi and 3G/4G see how long your smartphone battery lasts. Oh I did this recently with an old phone, it lasts around 4 days as well (and that's with an old battery)
Also a lot of apps abuse smartphone processing updating how many times per minute
But screens and processing power still cost a lot of energy
While I wouldn't trade my current smartphone for one of those, I do miss the lack of battery anxiety, and wish the manufacturers would make models for those of us who aren't obsessed with thinness. An iPhone 6 at 5/8" (15mm) would be awesome.