I do the vast majority of my communication by email, then text and last by voice.

I have a Droid Samsung S3, and find great battery longevity on wifi, and less on on 4g. If I am on 4g for about 8 hours, I am almost out of power. But I can turn off the 4g data, and only turn it on to update the que of emails etc. On wifi, I get 2 days (48 hours) easily.

It seems to me, like many things, you need to know, understand and manage your limited resources.

That is not the failure of the technology. All technology has limits.