To be honest, I don't understand why manufacturers are still optimizing CPU performance instead of battery life. Who really needs a 4 or even 8-core mobile device? Most people I know with a smartphone, barely make it through the day and I often see them charging their phones at work.

In my opinion, companies should follow Lenovo's lead and address battery life concerns. A phone like the P780, with a 4000mAh battery, is spec'd to last for 36 talking hours [1] and it can easily be used for 2-3 days without charging.

I don't believe it is directly commercialized in the US, but the price point is not far from this Motorola, as it can be acquired from China for around 230-250 USD (e.g. through aliexpress).

[1]: http://shop.lenovo.com/ae/en/smartphones/p-series/p780/

"I don't understand why manufacturers are still optimizing CPU performance instead of battery life."

Maybe the simple answer is that they do not priorize processor power over battery life. Maybe they invest in both, but make more progress in the former than the latter.

I think one argument is that if you have multiple cores you can switch most of them into powersaving mode when they're unused, so you can have lower power use overall with more cores since max utilization won't be reached as often.

That works out, if individual cores are nice and low power. An 8-core 600MHz, for example, would really live up to that ideal. But a 1.2GHz 8-core?

Who needs a 4 core device? Android users.

Try getting an Android 4 device with 4 cores and 2 cores and compare them. The performance difference is stark. The 2 core devices feel very sluggish on Android 4.

There's absolutely no performance difference whatsoever in normal usage. Really, none. Squat. Zilch. Zero.

GPU performance and memory bandwidth are waaaaaaay more important than an extra 2 cores that'll be turned off 99% of the time anyway.

Tell that to my garbage Motorola Photon which had a graphics chip

All phones have a graphics chip, that doesn't mean it's a GOOD graphics chip. It also very much doesn't mean that it's fast enough for the screen resolution.

In the case of your Photon it was also running Gingerbread which didn't have 2D hardware acceleration. Made especially worse by the fact that Tegra 2 doesn't have NEON, so the software painting was extra slow on that device AND it had a "high" resolution.

It was a badly designed device from top to bottom. A quad core wouldn't have done a damn thing to help its pitiful performance (especially as there's still only a single UI thread doing the painting)

No it was not running Gingerbread, the first thing I did was hack it. It was running Cyanogen based on Ice Cream Sandwich.

I would not be surprised by the fact that it was poorly designed, and it's the main reason I will did not nor will not consider another Motorola phone in the future.

Are sure that isn't a euphamism for "if you unplug at 9am you can probably make it until 5pm before it powers off due to dead battery"? Unless you're seeing something I"m not there's nothing really there that tells us anything solid about the actual battery life.

Wait. What? I thought this problem was already solved. My Lumia 920 easily lasts through the day without requiring a charge and is already almost a year old.

Mine runs two days on a charge. Ofcourse the downside of the 920 is that it's one of the heaviest phones out there. Still, i'm really happy with it.

Lower-end and mid-range phones get this right more often than higher-end phones, I think. My Galaxy Light will easily last for a few days with light to moderate usage.

Yeah, my Galaxy Nexus went 24 hours without charging this past weekend and is about the same age, IIRC.

My Nexus 5 sat at 80% battery remaining after 26 hours off the charger this morning. This with regular checking of emails, a couple of Facebook forays, some quick tests of a web app, and all of the services and background apps such entails. And despite my office/business being in a rural area with very sketchy cell coverage (thus the phone has to work much harder).

Of course if I used much more screen on time my duration would be single digit hours instead. But such is the problem with comparing battery times when we all do different things with our devices, and use them in significantly different conditions.

That's interesting, for my nexus 5 (granted it's only a few days old so perhaps there is some break-in) seems to go down to 80-85% in 10-15 minutes of morning web surfing/reading.

Perhaps I have a bad device or something?

With high brightness and a lot of active, screen-on use, it will absolutely chew through the battery (though 20% in 15 minutes is extremely excessive: For wifi browsing Anandtech found it to be among the top devices, actually beating the benchmark iPhone devices. They then removed that result from the listing pending the full review release). What impressed me most from it is the standby time which is extremely impressive, even in difficult conditions.