From what I understand, this is a basic smartphone drawback. Average use will get you about a day’s worth of battery, so plugging it in each night is standard. Most smartphones are about the same, give or take a few hours. The iPhone has better battery life than an Android phone, but AIUI that’s because up until recently you couldn’t multitask. Multitasking is much heavier on the battery than one program at a time.
Just basic, or inevitable? My phone isn’t “smart”–it’s moderately aware–but it has a simple browser, basic syncing, texting, email, and a good music player, so it eats up power. BUT…the battery is removable. I have five of them (they’re cheap), and a separate charger (even cheaper). I just carry around two or three extras, and my phone is NEVER plugged in. It never has to be–though it’s always on with Bluetooth running.
Is it too much to ask for a smart phone to have a removable, cheap battery?
Most smartphones (except the IPhone, I believe) have removable batteries, but I assume many people don’t want to constantly change batteries. And if you’re not using the phone constantly, they usually last a day and you can load them overnight.
The big power draws are
[ul]
[li]The big screen, when you’re actively using the phone[/li][li]radio, if you’re syncing data (Mail, calendar, weather, Facebook, …) often[/li][/ul]
Using multiple batteries is easily possible, but not absolutely necessary.
The HTC Desire has a removable battery. ‘Cheap’ is in the eye of the beholder; about $30.
Plus, if you don’t want to crack open the phone every time you want to change the battery (and I don’t), there are external battery packs like this one. Charge it up overnight alongside your phone, then plug your phone into it in the middle of the day to give it some extra juice.
Still, plugging in the phone every night shouldn’t be overly burdensome, unless you’re going camping without a generator or something.
Carrying spare batteries would be annoying - partly because it takes some time for the phone to reboot after you power down and replace the battery. (It takes close to 1 minute for my TMobile G1.)
For some phones, there are optional (usually third party) high-capacity batteries available. I recently got one for my G1 and now the battery a full day of very heavy use (GPS left on all the time, and using it for navigation and web browsing frequently). It’ll probably last 2 days of light use.
Neither of those is overly burdensome, but they’re more burdensome than just switching out a battery–which takes less than a minute, restarting and all–less than the amount of time to take out a packed-up charger, find an outlet and a safe place for charging.
How many times has someone missed your call, and the reason?: “Oh, you called me? I didn’t know. Sorry, my phone was charging in the other room.”
You can buy phone chargers that run on AA or AAA batteries, with one of those you don’t have to worry about finding an outlet.
So instead of carrying a couple of extra charged batteries for my phone, I carry some AAAs to charge the one battery that’s in my phone?
Ok, but you have to admit you’ve purposefully chosen a silly example that you can mock. I don’t use Tasker, but I do use Locale, and my absolute favorite, useful, and appreciated-by-non-techies rule is “if it is after 10pm and I’m at home, turn the ringer off until 7am.” The reason you’d want to learn to do something like that is pretty obvious, even to my mom. The other rule I like is “if the battery gets below 20%, turn wifi off,” but that’s just because my android battery life kind of sucks. 
Samsung Moment here, but I have the same experience, and feel exactly the same about StarTAC. I wasn’t anticipating having a device that’s full of the same maintenance headaches as all the other PCs in my life.
I ran across this massive battery pack for the HTC Incredible and thought of this thread. Expands the life of the phone to 2 days of heavy use and 4-5 days of moderate/light use. It makes the phone bulkier, but the majority of reviewers say that’s a blessing in disguise.
For those of you on android devices who aren’t afraid to root your phone, installing a custom kernal, cpu throttling app, or both may result in a dramatic decrease in battery consumption. Google xda and your phone model for THE forum for this type of stuff.