The battery life improves incrementally for every product over time.... but technology grows by leaps and bounds... leaving the device even more thirsty for battery-power.
When the original iTouch was introduced it had no iTunes/App Store on board... so was plain internet brower/iPod.... but with the new bells and whistles the battery improvements were imminent.
The battery numbers claimed by manufacturers means nothing! Might be true if you let your iPod go on and on for 36 hrs without fiddling with the screen or anything of that sort. Try real-life usage figures. The screen draws lot of power plus the iTouch and iPhone (worst in this case) have lot of other sensors and gadgetry.... Touch-Screen, WiFi, 3G and sensors dont get a ride for free... so when you will be accessing someones Playlist over the WiFi in the future U will be drawing power for Screen, WiFi and Audio Playback and the battery performance will be miles away from the predicted numbers for Cupertino!
User replaceable batteries sound ok, but still its not always that you will carry them around and everyone will want to shell out extra bucks for batteries! Plus this will swell the device's form factor and mar its solid-form factor and looks. What we really need is a jump... sorta something on the lines of the Li-Ion technology from the earlier Ni-Cd batteries!
