OK, after messing with R8BE001 for a few more days, I think the battery consumption I reported was not as serious as I thought initially. Typically, for the first three hours of the day after leaving the charger, the phone loses about 2% battery per hour on standby alone with bluetooth on. After that it becomes difficult to track battery life as I begin to use it intermittently.

I will take a few more days baseline on this firmware, and then drop back to an R6 with the same experiment. I no longer have the R7 that came on the phone from the branded AT&T pack, but I am not going back to that anyway.

z