Kyle Wagner:

Battery isn’t some one-off feature. You don’t fritter entire train rides away worried that your phone doesn’t have diamond-cut chamfered edges, or which widgets you should have on your home screen. (Or if you do, that is very sad and you should stop.) Your night has never been ruined because your apps load too slowly. We bitch about annoyances, app availability, syncing issues. But if we accept that reception almost entirely subject to outside forces, you’re left with battery life as more or less the only way your phone can totally screw up your plans. It’s the only thing you worry about. And we really need to stop ignoring it.

Time has a good overview of new battery tech that is seeking to solve the problem. Unfortunately most of it looks to be a few years away, at best.