I'm in a city without LTE yet for this carrier, so that isn't it. Haven't installed any apps that should be background intensive either. I used to stream music all day from the iTunes match and still have more battery than what I have just listening to previously downloaded music.
All the more reason to turn off LTE in the phone. Not sure how the phone is configured, but it's entirely possible the phone is using up battery trying to find non-existent LTE towers unless it's explicitly disabled
(but I do agree with you in that battery life in most of the android phones is terrible)
I installed "System Tuner" and found that my live wallpaper was chewing up CPU even when I wasn't browsing the main desktop. Once I switched to a different (non-broken) wallpaper my battery life doubled.
I've also used this tool a few times to figure out why my phone was running hot (even though I wasn't using it). For instance, last night, my Facebook app was in a bad state and was chewing up 20% CPU in the background. I killed it and everything was back to normal.
The tool isn't the easiest to use, but it might help.
