I just bought my first iphone. I am so disappointed in the battery life on the iphone5. Have the phones always been this way? Is there anything in the works to improve the battery life?

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html this website gives your tips on how to improve battery life. if still have major issue restore new

Without knowing what battery life you are seeing we can't determine if you have a problem. Have you compared your usage to the Technical Specifications?

• Talk time: Up to 8 hours on 3G
• Standby time: Up to 225 hours
• Internet use: Up to 8 hours on 3G, up to 8 hours on LTE, up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi
• Video playback: Up to 10 hours
• Audio playback: Up to 40 hours

Under normal use, unless there's a problem with your phone, battery life is comparable to any other smart phone and better than some. If you've never owned a smart phone before you will be disappointed with the battery life on all smart phones. You should expect to charge any of them daily. It's a mistake to think of it as a phone at all; it's a very powerful pocket-sized computer that can also make phone calls.

Your battery life is most strongly a function of what you use on it and how long you use those features. As it's new to you it may simply be that you use it more than your daughter. Most people will get through a day from one charge. So the best way to use it is to charge it overnight, every night. This has the added advantage of keeping WiFi on if you have a local network so background processes do not use cellular data. (WiFi turns off to save battery when the phone is on standby, leaving cellular the only way to update app data for apps that run in background).