Battery Life Issues

Hey I just picked up my new Captivate and I'm having a hard time keeping the phone alive longer than 5 hours. Are there any battery saving tips or tricks I can get? I would like to try and keep my live wallpaper if I can. I really like the galaxy background. 

Right out of the box, you want to try everything on the phone and download things and show your phone off, so battery life will suffer.  Here are a few things you can try to  make your battery last more than a few hours.

The biggest power hogs for this, or any, smartphone are the display and the radios (or, more accurately, apps that use the radios all the time). Turn the display brightness down (even the lowest setting is pretty bright) and turn off automatic brightness control.  If you swipe across the menu bar you can change the brightness setting.  Be careful that you aren’t inadvertently doing that. It’s annoying, but set the screen timeout to 30 seconds.  Turn off the Wifi and Bluetooth radios unless you are using them for something.  Turn off as many auto-syncing/geotagging services in your apps as you can.  Live wallpapers will use more power than static ones, and dark wallpapers use less power than brightly colored ones.

Don't get caught up using task killers to try to "manage" power consumption.  Apps only use power when they are active.  Backgrounded apps are suspended (unless they have a service that keeps track of something) and use no power.  Leave app/memory management to the OS.  Android isn’t a desktop OS; it was designed for mobile devices on batteries.

I have a similar problem.  My phone dies in about 5 hours with little use.  I'm due for a new contract in October and I am seriously thinking of avoiding any Samsung products due to the short battery life.  iPhone here I come...

I've read some of the answers on this forum but they require a depth of technical knowledge I don't have.