I'm in the same boat. I don't think I've ever seen more than one bar on my phone's meter at home. But with mirage's latest rom, link2sd, and juice defender it's a very usable device. It's worse for me because I have the $25 plan, so the newest phone I could get without a price increase is the triumph and a little research shows that it has lots of hardware issues.
One thing that looks tempting is t-mobile's $30 plan for 100 minutes and unlimited data with a nexus 4 from google. That would get me new hardware, JB, camera, flash, etc., and a friend seems to be doing well with stretching the minutes by using data for calls.
That t-mobile no-contract plan doesn't just jump out at you - they would much rather sell you a phone and it's only availabe online. It's on page
Monthly 4G Prepaid Plans | Compare Prepaid Data Plans | T-Mobile
Web & Text with 100 Minutes Talk
$30 per month
Talk 100 minutes
Text Unlimited
Web Unlimited*
*First 5GB at up to 4G speeds
The features I don't like about the nexus are the non-removable battery and no SD card or LTE. Oh, and there are quite a few reports of people having problems with the glass back. I'm glad that google is helping to expand the market for no-contract phones. "Free phones" need to die!
Might just hang onto the V and see when google releases their next nexus which looks like it will be a pretty nice motorola phone. The stock V was terrible because there was no room for apps and battery life was very poor and it was stuck on froyo.