How to preserve your battery all day - MUST READ

Question

when roaming out in the boonies this past weekend, my phone died within ~6 hours without using it at all.  i was pretty annoyed.
the second day, i did the following:
1) turned off GPS and Google location services
2) turned off data roaming
3) turned off data usage
turning off these three things immediately reaped benefits.  my battery life went down about 2% per hour without using it.  off the charger at 9am, texted for maybe half an hour off and on (i.e. the screen was probably on a total of 30 minutes) and i made one 5 minute roaming phone call.  still about 70% by 5pm.
i turned on data usage and data roaming the next day, and sure enough, the phone was hosed by like 3pm.
i know some of you need to use data/GPS heavily, and the only way to deal with it is to get a second battery.  however, with data off, you can still call and text message, and that alone is acceptable to me when in roaming-only country land.
i don't know if this suggestion has been posted.  if it has, please lock/delete this thread.
also, there have been complaints about the phone just being off sometimes, with the user having to power it back up.  webOS has been blamed, but i think it's just the fit of the battery.  i've found that even light jarring of the phone on its end can disrupt the connection at the battery to the phone, so i took a post-it, cut a small strip the length of the battery, folded it in half once, and placed it between the rounded end of the battery and the phone (on the side of the battery).  it keeps it more snug and in place, and i have not discovered my phone to be off since i did this.
it's kind of a ghetto fix, but honestly, i never take the battery out anyway, so i don't mind.

Answer 1

also, it should be noted that i live in the DC area, and even with data usage and data roaming enabled, my battery still only drops like 2-3%/hr if i'm not using it.  if i take it off the charger at 9am, by 5pm, i'm at about 75% with maybe 5 minutes of phone calling, 5 minutes of texting, and ~15 minutes of internet use (mostly mobile sites like m.cnn.com, etc).
if i use sprint TV or navigation, it seems to drain the battery very quickly, but i can always plug it in either to my computer, an outlet, or into the USB connector in my car.  it's certainly not bad for a small 1150mAh battery, but i wouldn't count on using sprint navigation as a replacement for a true garmin/tom tom.
however, when i'm using navigation in the car and i'm also listening to music via bluetooth audio, the audio will drop by 90% in volume for the turn-by-turn voice instructions to come through my car's speakers, which is really nice.