I fully agree with you on the battery life. My last smartphone before my N900 lasted 9-10 days on a single charge, with heavy daily use. It was powered by Palm OS, as yet unsurpassed by anything in terms of user friendliness, maturity, stability and, above all, battery life. It was lightning-fast, with no slowdowns at all. All with a 144 MHz CPU and 24 MB memory, shared between RAM and storage. Why are "modern" phones such resource hogs?

Which brings me the thing I find the most sucky about modern IT, desktops or mobiles alike. Why does it take a 3.2 GHz octa-core CPU with 16 GB RAM to do the task I did in 1995 on a 40 MHz CPU with 4 MB RAM? That's the configuration I used then for desktop publishing. The mobile phone I use to type this reply on has a 25x faster CPU, 250x more RAM, and even a slightly better screen than my desktop publishing setup from 1995. So achieving the same job should be a doddle. Why is it not?

EDIT 1
I nearly forgot to mention: Palm OS was also the last one to nail the desktop sync Just Right. Everything I used ever since has/had some issues. Duplicated, deleted or overwritten contacts, lost messages, you name it. Come on, industry, you have a prime example how to do it. Why do you need to keep inventing new things that just Don't Work?

EDIT 2
A special addition for Dave: guess when this marvel of technology I am on about was released? In 2004, a bit over 10 years ago