It does save battery, but it also means that you you're limiting the capabilities... it's a compromise. When looking at battery saving techniques I run a gain vs compromise ratio in my head... well that's the way I do it

In the pursuit for better battery life further and further on my old phones I find myself implementing solutions which resulted in minimal gain and with more inconvenience - in my case, dropping clock speeds or altering core wakeups did not do it for me in past tries, but I would certainly love to be proven wrong

That is great. 10 hours on average is a whole lot of extra time. I managed poorly with my S2 though, it didn't have much tolerance to UV and lowering clockspeeds was even more of a disaster since the phone had to be on full speed with today's applications

There's a setting that tries to automatically connect to a WiFi network with a stronger signal - is that disabled? Sometimes there are hotspots with the same SSIDs, but you only see one in the settings but to the phone it's different and it tries to connect to that hotspot.

Fair enough But the phone does set its clock speeds and activated cores according to the current load, so unless Sony did a shoddy job of a good load balancing it wouldn't have to ramp up to max freqs just for the heck of it. But I also agree that Sony may have set a huge margin of tolerance to cater for varying qualities, so there's gains to be had when performing fine-tuning.

There's an app with a phone icon that does the T9 searching... can't remember the exact name but I read it a few days back. So don't remove that