Today I stopped by a Verizon store to see if they could do anything about
the battery life on my Razr V3M. I've seen it run down completely in as
little as four hours of doing nothing. I went to a store with on-site
technicians, so I would get someone qualified to deal with the problem. He
went through the usual stuff - told me how using the camera, using
Bluetooth, setting it to Vibrate, can run down the battery, and I explained
to him again, that it was doing NOTHING - just sitting there in standby.
Then he explained that the Razrs have a very short battery life and that if
I'm in an area with weak service or no service, four hours is actually
pretty good. I pointed out to him that almost everywhere I go, I get a weak
signal, and he said there was nothing he could do about it other than to
swap for another model, which would help but not much. I pointed out that
when I had a V3 with Cingular, I could talk for hours in a weak signal area
and the battery meter never budged. He said that's just the way CDMA works -
all their phones are that way.

But then I've had an interesting CS experience with Cingular as well. A
month and a half after cancelling the service on my old TDMA AT&T phones, I
got a letter from Cingular telling me they're going to start charging me an
extra $4.95 per month per phone to recoup the cost of keeping the TDMA
equipment going when so few people are using it.