Reading your post more closely, yeah, location services in particular is a major battery hog. I never use it. I only ever turn on the GPS antenna under very specific circumstances, and get super anal about turning it back off again as soon as I'm done using it.

ETA: But to perfectly honest, the Galaxy S4 has the best battery life of any phone I've ever owned, even with the location services drains. I'm very Samsung fanboy when it comes to phones these days.

Glad it got figured out. Sean I just imagined your set up was like mine (not portable; my tv and everything just stays in one place so wire lengths aren't a big deal; I wasn't being snarky.)

My Note 2 has decent battery life, even with location services on. I hear that the Motorola phones (Moto X specifically) are good choices for straightforward Android phones with good battery life as well. I would get a moto x for my next phone if I didn't actually use the stylus in the Note on a daily basis. I will have to stick with the Note line until another manufacturer takes active styli seriously.

My wife's Moto X battery life is much shorter than that of her previous phone, an iPhone 4. I'd imagine its shorter than some of the other Android phones, too, since it's a nicely small phone and that means less room for battery.

My GS4 used to have decent battery life until the 4.2.2 update, and now it blows. I've had my phone go from 100% leaving the house to 15% by the time I get to work.

I think I could make it behave better if I spent some time configuring Tasker/Trigger/IFFT to smartly turn location services on and off throughout the day, but I do miss my iPhone's battery which could easily go a day and a half of heavy use without dying. (I don't miss anything at all about iOS, but the battery thing is a killer. I have a portable battery that will fully charge my phone 4 times before needing to be plugged in itself, but if I wanted to walk around with something that heavy in my purse I wouldn't have bought a light slim phone to begin with!)

The Note line is fantastic, but I spend too much time on the subway for a phone I can't operate with one hand. (I had a Note 3 for about a week before I reluctantly admitted it just wasn't working out. The squeezed-down one-hand mode is clever, but ultimately didn't work for me.)

Battery life is also the reason I'm not eager to switch from my Pebble to an Android Wear watch - because it's e-ink it can go a week without charging, even with an app like Glance running all the time. And I wear it at night for sleep tracking and as an alarm clock (vibrating so I don't wake DH at 6am), which I couldn't do if I had to charge it every night.

My Moto X has very good battery life, and good life for both an Android phone and the featureset it offers (like always on visual notification and voice recognition). I went from sometimes not making it through a day to pretty much never needing a panic recharge.

I wasn't being snarky.

Sorry, I think I came off sounding snippish and shouldn't have. I had more than a few annoyances yesterday, so I'm sure it was seeping out.

Now for my new annoyance -- the wall I want to hang my TV from. It's a plaster or rockwall wall, and it's exterior (the stairs are on the other side) but I swear to dog this wall doesn't have a single stud in it, and I'm left wondering what's holding up the damned building.

Stud finder gives crazy crazy readings, even on deep scan. (It faults frequently, no matter how slow you're moving it, finds electrical conduit in places that make no sense, finds one side of a stud but then reads the entire wall as empty when trying to find the other side....

And tapping on it, the whole damned thing sounds hollow.

I'm half tempted to take a hammer to it, but that would be unproductive.

Anybody got any thoughts?

Does anyone have any opinions on the Chromecast vs. the Roku streaming stick? Our TV needs are pretty dang simple; we don't have cable, and I realized that for what I spent last year buying episodes we missed from iTunes, we might as well just subscribe to Hulu Plus. My laptop is getting too old to reliably stream, and stretching the HDMI cable across the living room is a hazard for our (read: my) clumsy feet.

Our Blu Ray player streams Netflix and other services, but no Hulu. Bummer. So, we're deciding between the Chromecase or the Roku stick. Any opinions, pro/con?

I just got a Chromecast. I detest that it doesn't use a standard remote. I would have gotten a Roku stick but I wanted HBO Go and Comcast still will not allow authentication through a Roku, for no apparent reason but spite. That is basically the only thing the chromecast can do that the a roku can't near as I can tell.

Basically I vote Roku. It has the best app list and best interface by far, and if you like controlling from your phone yiu can do it with the Roku app but you also have the option of a standard remote. Only caveat is if you have Hbo with Com cast and want HBO Go.

Anybody got any thoughts?

Does the studfinder work properly on other walls? If not, try a different studfinder. If so, I got nothin'.