Thanks for all replies!

Don't get me wrong: I love my eDGe even with the battery life it provides right now. I was only wondering how to squeeze the most out of this platform.

I think there is good hope that we will see some improvements in battery life with Android 2.x versions. Another thing I will investigate is how to easily find and stop processes in Android. As you do not explicitly terminate an application, I suspect they might remain loaded and waste some CPU cycles in the background.