Second, these phones do work without doing anything....
It will make it as long as any other phone out there. Over a day which is better than an iPhone.
That's the whole problem -- they don't. There's nothing magical about Android (or iOS for that matter) or the components being used by the different manufacturers. 4G burns more power than 3G which burns more power than 2G. A larger screen burns more power. More radios, more CPU cores, higher clocks, more GPU cores, etc. all burn more power. Nothing comes for free -- but you can be smart about it in the design.
If you're going to have a device with all of that, and you don't do anything special in the OS to manage it, you will burn more power. As it stands today, Apple does a much better job of managing power at a low level than Android does. There are downsides to Apple's decision in terms of how they handle multi-tasking or notifications, but the upside is that they do a better job of managing power.
But it's like saying you shouldn't have to turn off the lights when you leave a room or you shouldn't have to turn off you car when you get home.
Certain things burn energy.
It's not that simple. I contend that yes, the lights should turn off and your car should turn off. In fact, this already exists today: There are cars that will turn off the gas engine when at a stoplight and sensors in rooms that turn off the lights if nobody is in the room.
This type of thing happens today in hardware as well. CPU or GPU cores that are idle get clock or power gated. Different parts of the chips are on different voltage islands, and there are hardware sensors that detect the load on the various cores and interfaces to set the power states and control clocks and voltages based on activity/load.
So some of this is just a matter of making components more power efficient or smarter, and some of it is making the OS smarter. Things like detecting the throughput and switching down to lower power states on the device. If you don't need 4G throughput right now do you need to be running at the higher voltage/clocks, or can you scale it down to 2G?
My point is that the USER should not have to worry about all of this. Devices need to be smarter, because the technology exists today. Not all hardware takes advantage of leading edge process technologies, or power gating, or voltage islands, etc to reduce power. Not all software and OS functionality is written in a manner to optimize for power. It's possible, but requires a lot of extra effort. The bottom line is that the USER should not have to care about any of this. They should not have to explicitly disable ANY functionality -- it should JUST WORK.
It's like MacBookPro's and their GPU switching. Apple gives you a powerful discrete GPU to get the best performance, but unlike Windows laptops with similar GPU's, it doesn't mean that you get crap battery life. They intelligently switch (completely seamlessly) between the discrete and integrated GPU based on your activity.. and they can do this multiple times per second. So you get the battery life of the integrated GPU's, and you get the performance of the discrete GPU's. Best of both worlds, and the user doesn't have to explicitly enable/disable anything -- it just works!
