[rayiner]

Part of the problem with discussions about phone battery life is that the available websites don't do a very good job of testing it. My anecdotal experience with carrying an iPhone 5 for years, then a Lumia for about a year, then a Nexus 5 for about six months is that the Nexus 5 is by far the worst at dealing with marginal signal conditions, like my train commute from DE to PA. I've never seen this sort of thing formally tested anywhere.

[georgemcbay]

I'm a fan of Android, use a Nexus 5 as my personal phone (and used a Nexus 4 prior to that) and make my current living writing Android apps, but you're right about this.

On my list of annoyances with Android, the way it handles marginal signal conditions (on every Android device I've ever used, which is quite a lot of them) is very high up there. Android (relatedly) does not handle wifi/cell radio passing very well, it will hold on to a poor wifi signal long after it should have switched over to the much more usable cell connection. I find myself regularly having to explicitly switch wifi off when there is a poor wifi connection available (which is luckily pretty easy to do but annoying that you have to manage it manually) just to get a reasonably usable network connection for apps.