Trying to figure out if you’ve got a device with good battery life takes time. It’s easy to say, a day or two after you’ve taken your new smartphone out of the box and just started using it, that it’s got the best battery life “ever.” And maybe it does! You might actually be right, but then everything starts working against it. From the little things, like that email you get, or whatever other notification you might receive.

They all start to add up.

Of course, the big things really kill that battery life, too. Keeping the display on. Playing games, watching movies and constantly checking those social networking streams can all whittle the battery down before you know it. We’ve all been there before, one smartphone at a time. Sure, there have been shining lights in the darkness that is a powered off smartphone display, but for the most part we’re all still craving that extra bit of juice.

Bigger batteries help, but it’s just a stopgap until we get some better battery technology. Until then, we’ve got to hope that the manufacturers start implementing changes within the software itself (just like Google has done with the upcoming Android L) to eek out extra time with our devices. After all, these people should want us to use these gadgets, right?

So, people have been complaining about battery drain in iDevices with iOS 8 ever since its release — both in just the software side, and including the new hardware that just launched over the weekend. You can find it on their support forums. And I’ve had a few people tell me their iPhones have been dying pretty quickly, too. I can imagine that this is remarkably frustrating. I know that I would be pretty upset if it were happening to me (knock on wood).

And yet, I can’t help but think that I’ve finally got myself an iPhone that I don’t have to worry about. And, as I said earlier, I know that all of this could come crumbling down because I’ve only had the phone barely long enough to get over first impressions, but when I see that my standby time is over two days, and my usage time is over 9 hours, well, I get pretty excited.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was complaining about the battery life in my iPhone 5s, and now I feel like this is — potentially — a complete one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn here. And I want to keep this good news going for weeks, months and well into the launch of whatever comes next. Am I honestly expecting it to? No, no not really. I would not be surprised in the slightest that if by Friday I’m back to wishing I had more power every single day.

But, right now, I’m going to just soak all this battery life in. And play so many games.