I had the phone fully charged, used it to navigate by car from SF to a place in Mountain View, checked email a few times from Mountain View, and the phone was completely dead for the ride back.
If a single person at HTC or Google had tried to use this phone for any kind of normal utilization, I think it's quite likely it would not have been launched.
If I'd purchased the phone instead of getting it as a giveaway, I would surely have been irate. As it was, I sold it to someone via CraigsList for a few hundred bucks.
This is why I predict Apple will continue to dominate. Android and the Android ecosystem still have many of these same kind of lapses and warts. My Nexus 7 is very greedy on battery and does not go into any kind of hibernation, which means that if I forget to charge it, it's dead after two days with no use at all.
I see, still seems like something was way off with the specific mode. It also mentions that an update increased the battery life - although not by how much.
That sounds like a huge exaggeration or a broken phone. What model was it? There is no way a phone like this would be sold.