iPhone 5 battery disappointing compared to my iPhone 4

first of all, you're being very vague. We don't know what you're doing with your iPhone.

With an LTE phone, you're going to use more data, because it's quicker, and therefore you'll do more with it. Streaming audio? Well, it'll be streaming audio at a higher quality. Streaming video? same thing.

Also, there are a ton of things you can do with your iPhone 5 to improve battery life. Go into location services and turn off the apps that don't need it (you should only really need it on maps and weather) and turn off push notifications for apps that you don't want to be notified about (most games will ask if they can send you notifications, which are always ads)

Go into privacy > location services and scroll down to system services. You don't need location services for most of those, except cell network search.

I turned off a lot of these, calibrated my battery, and my battery life was much improved.

 

1) Expectation? You could've easily checked this in beforehand. It's like just expecting your iPhone 4 when you got it would have better battery life than an early '2000 Nokia. Battery life on phones have gone one way since the smartphones.

2) Battery life will vary slightly from battery to battery, but you would notice a truly bad one. Do you use LTE/4G alot? Is your screen on a higher brightness setting? Do you have multiple apps running in the background?

There are several factors you should consider where you might be using things that didn't exist on your i4, and thus gives the impression of worse battery life. As it is with a brand new Galaxy s4 and a Nokia 3310.

 

My iPhone 5 has better battery life than any of my previous iPhones (3G, 3GS, 4, 4S). I can go almost 2 days without charging under normal usage.

 

Which iOS? Jailbroken? Location services?