[spooningtamarin]

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.

http://imgur.com/QLN17SS

This is about a one year worth of work but I guess Android engineers don't have time to optimize per device.

You could probably squeeze out the same for any mobile device, although iPhone is probably not that configurable.

[Tiksi]

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.

[raverbashing]

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

[_nedR]

Really want to read more about it. You should do blog or do a write-up on it on xda-developers about it.

Hell you should release a mod for whatever tablet you are using, and make a killing.

[atratus]

amazing, write this up please!