Before you shake your fist solely at Apple’s engineers, Rik Myslewski asks you to consider several other charge-chugging factors.

If you’re not getting enough battery life out of your smartphone, don’t just blame the manufacturer. There’s more to how long a phone can operate than how big its battery is or how much time you spend streaming video or playing Tiny Wings--there’s the handset’s guts, services provided by your wireless carrier, and your phone’s software.

Consider, for example, the physical bits and bobs that connect your phone to your carrier. Apple has caught flack for not yet offering a high-speed 4G phone, but the current 4G tech, LTE, is hard on batteries. Samsung’s Galaxy S II HD LTE, for example, requires an 1850 milliampere-hour (mAh) cell to keep its battery life acceptable--that’s 30 percent more juice than the iPhone 4S’s 1432 mAh. (Don’t worry about exactly what mAh means, just know that the more, the merrier.)

In addition to a bigger battery, 4G requires more chippery. First, LTE doesn’t yet support voice calls--it’s currently used only for data. Verizon says that voiceover LTE--known as VoLTE, pronounced “voltey”--will arrive this year, and AT&T says next year. But until it arrives, other circuitry is needed to carry voice. Second, you not only need 3G circuitry for voice, you also need it for data when 4G isn’t available, plus 2G circuitry for additional “fallback” insurance.

In addition to those 2G, 3G, and 4G voice and data radios, as they’re called, your smartphone has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth--and here’s where the network comes in to help increase battery life. Currently, smartphone users need to tell their phones when to turn Wi-Fi on and off. Instead, the network should sense what signals are available, and work seamlessly, instantly, and dynamically with the phone to use Wi-Fi, 4G, 3G, and 2G as needs require--a trick that would not only help battery life but also free up precious network bandwidth when the high-speed spectrum isn’t required.

A smarter network would also be better at handling what’s known in the trade as quality of service, abbreviated as QoS and pronounced “kwoss.” QoS support is a set of techniques that provides different levels of service depending upon what’s being transmitted. A Voice over Internet Protocol service (VoIP, pronounced like it looks) such as Skype requires a higher QoS than does, say, looking up a recipe for braised lamb shanks.

Wireless carriers are working with network-equipment and software providers to develop application programming interfaces (APIs, spelled out, not pronounced “ay-pies” or “ape-eyes”) to allow a network’s assets to be more easily and efficiently accessed by developers. These APIs include hooks that make it easier to control different QoS levels--which brings us to our final battery-life variable: software.

As might be guessed, the way software uses a smartphone’s processing and communications circuitry greatly affects battery life--and that includes not only software from third-party developers, but also a phone’s basic apps, operating system, and firmware--those latter bits being things that Apple has occasionally muffed.

And here we run into a bit of a conundrum. A wireless carrier wants apps to have minimal effect on their network, a smartphone maker wants apps to have minimal effect on their handset’s battery life, but a developer wants apps to provide the richest possible user experience--and that often means increased battery suckage.

Despite that conflict, we’re starting to see more and better cooperation among carriers, manufacturers, and developers, and more efficient APIs being made available at all levels from networks to operating systems. Add this cooperation to ever-improving chip efficiency and battery tech, and there will likely come a day when you’ll be able to stream Netflix or YouTube from dawn to dusk on your iPhone 6. Or 7. Or 8.

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Since the late 1980s, Rik Myslewski has paid his rent by keeping an eye on Apple. He was editor-in-chief of MacAddict from 2001 until its transformation into Mac|Life in early 2007, and is now a member of the snarkily sophisticated team at London’s The Register, which is “biting the hand that feeds IT” daily at www.theregister.co.uk.