I have used the phone regularly, every day, for more than six months. What I have learned is that if you have 3G on 24/7, then you cannot expect the phone to last longer than ~14 hours with 3 hours of screen time.
I don't know what battery life you (or others) are expecting, but I get that 3/14 combination with the following:
I am a 'power user' in that I tweak things in my phone for optimal performance, but doing the above has been very easy. I am still getting maximum out of my phone with respectable battery life.
I don't know what battery life you (or others) are expecting, but I get that 3/14 combination with the following:
- Brightness - During summer my brightness is 100% when outside, thus my battery life sometimes dips below 3h, but not too much. Otherwise I keep my brightness what is most comfortable me. I don't use auto-brightness, since that too may affect battery life.
- Sync - I don't sync any application or account where I do not need sync. That is, applications that sync anyway when started (like Facebook) do not need to be synced.
- Background / Push notifications - These can always stay on, since they don't take more battery. Push notifications are part of Google's own cloud, which means that if you have background sync on and use even a single Google service, then you can turn on all push notifications since they don't affect your battery life.
- Apps - Pay attention to apps that run services in the background. Take a look at Settings -> Apps -> Running and see if you have some application there that should not be. There are some badly developed apps that do 'notifications' with background services and not through Google Cloud and Push notifications. Might be a good idea to disable or uninstall those apps or tweak their settings. Also make sure that you don't leave apps, like Music or Radio apps, running while not using them.
- WiFi - Tweak your WiFi settings not to 'scan' for hotspots all the time. In fact, turn WiFi off entirely when you do not actually use WiFi.
- Battery Management - For the love of god, do NOT use battery management applications. These can cause glitches and whatnot, Android is able to maintain it's battery usage itself as long as you are not too careless.
- Settings - I don't use vibrate, haptic feedback and sound feedback on keyboards and don't use vibrate on most notifications. But these settings should not affect battery life all that much.
- Widgets - Some widgets can effectively become apps that keep running, which can quickly drain battery life. Make sure to only run widgets you actually need and use.
- Google Now - If you use Google Now, then turn off all the cards that you do not need, especially the ones with location-based notifications. Locations and GPS can quickly drain your battery.
I am a 'power user' in that I tweak things in my phone for optimal performance, but doing the above has been very easy. I am still getting maximum out of my phone with respectable battery life.