iPhone 4 incredibly fast battery drain

In the past I've been able to get probably 3 days from a full charge based on my usage pattern. Then all of a sudden my battery life was in the dirt as you all describe( 4 or 5 hours at best). I pretty much need a charger wherever I choose to spend any length of time. The phone was even warm.......One thing I didn't notice before the replacement but in retrospect was present, are pregnant pauses in keypad response to any application including the phone.

I'm having the same issue. After upgrading to 4.3.3 (now 4.3.5) my battery life is being away at an amazing rate. I have also noticed a definite delay when selecting apps, tapping to select a text box, etc. This is definitely an OS issue. I had no issues before. I did just delete my MobileMe account to see if that has any effect tomorrow.

I might of found a bug, responsible for battery drain by chance. I have had the iPhone 4 since it came out with no problem. Then one day it was loosing 5% a hour for no apparent reason. The only thing I had done different was to activate the pass lock, to keep my data safe. Once I had disabled the lock the phone battery was back to normal.

Hope that helps

I think you may be onto something. I also have recently put pass lock on my barely 3 month old phone and ever since my battery is draining ridiculously fast, like I've lost 3% writing this!! I'm going to turn it off right now and see how I go! Xfingers crossedx

As everyone else here... experiencing the same problems. Have even taken the phone into the store twice thinking I might need a new battery but after a diagnostic scan and system check... I am told battery is fine. I do not have MobileMe installed, so that is not my problem. It HAS to be something to do with an OS update that was pushed out... something is running in the background that cannot be turned off. Going to try turning off the pass lock... hope that works.

My company requires the passlock (screen lock) if I'm to receive corporate email on the phone so I didn't get to explore this as an issue. Interesting if this is where things went wrong in their OS push. In my case a restore as factory fixed the issue for me. It was my last resort. My bet is that a legacy OS setting that hurts the new version was carried over and a restore from factory took on a new setting template. On the bright side, all has been well since. I get probably 4 to 5 days out of the phone now. My usage is light.

Arrived late to this discussion but very grateful for all the suggestions listed. Couple of things - I got an exchange phone last week because my original phone was dead before lunch time most days with very limited use. I restored from back up to the new phone I got and the drain was still there however, with the new phone I havent put the pass lock back on it - same problem, lost 10% in an hour of sitting doing nothing with wifi off and everything else off as well.

Have just tried deleting and re installing my work exchange email account and will see if that has any impact. Some of the other things that people have mentioned I dont have as applications going on my phone.

To add to this problem for me, I am on holiday so have had to 'borrow' a desktop to synch with - and the restore process was a nightmare. I hope someone somewhere is acknowledging that there is an issue here.

I am late to the game here as well, but having the same issue. I havent' installed anything new as of late from the app stand point.

I had an older version of iOS, backed up, wiped and restored.

That DIDN'T do it.

I am charging my battery, I removed and added 3 of my four accounts (mobile me, exchange, gmail)

I am turning OFF location services and notification.

We'll see.

So it looks like either notification or location services did the trick.

I am guesing that it was the locaion services that did it. I'm going to turn the whole thing on just to make sure it's something in there.

If it's back to the quick drain, then I'm going to reactiveate location services one app at a time.

I'll bet it's one of te big ones.

I'll share more later and report any rouge apps to the app store…

Quick update - I am pretty sure that my problem is a hardware one - yesterday I restored the phone to factory settings and have turned everything off (what use is that I wonder, for a theoretically functional phone?) including location, wifi, bluetooth, 3g, notifications and anything else that seems to be optional and I havent installed anything at all on it - just a bare bones phone. I had a short message exchange yesterday afternoon and the battery levels went down as I looked at them.

I charged it overnight and unfortunately didnt have my glasses on when I disconnected to check it was 100% but at 8.58 (just an hour since I got up it is now at 82% - I think it is time for the man at the Genius Bar to give me some more magical advice (or change the phone again!).

BTW, what is an acceptable drain rate with normal functional usage? - I dont play games much, I do listen to audio books (not now, they all got deleted), I check my email, send text messages and make the occasional phone call. Before I came on holiday I used to get through a working day with some in reserve and a pretty much continual use with 3g, bt, wifi turned on. I think I would be happy with 3 - 5% per hour with normal usage - is that reasonable?

Seems liek opening Facebook and or the NPR app with location services on may be causing the drain on my phone. I may just leave all that stuff off.

I've expereienced the problem twice. Once while in the US my 3gs (on some variant of iOS 4 then) suddenly ate away on the battery like there's no tomorrow. Turned off everything made it last maybe 4 h when not using it at all. Got extremely frustrated, away from home I could not do a reinstall etc. What I did over the course of maybe a week was frequent hard resets. And after maybe 10 or 20 of them suddenly battery was back to normal again.

Now I upgraded our old 3gs to iOS 5 and suddenly the same problem appeared (as described in the above posts), going through all the motions now, but as of now, no fix.

Brand new 4s is fine btw, good battery life etc.

Message was edited by: Andreas Keim, spelling

I was having the same issues with my iphone 4s 16gb battery draining. I read everything posted in this thread. My phone was running hot when idle and seemed to lose more battery than when I actually used the phone.

I've tested a few solutions and this is what I came up with.

I do not have Cloud setup

I had 4 email accounts

I tested with location services off

I dimmed my screen

I deleted recently installed outs

I already had push notifications off

I turned off automatically set date and time

I turned off calendar from notification menu.

I started by dimming my screen, disabling push notifications, and turning location services off..helped very little. I deleted recently installed apps..this helped a little. I turned off automatically set date and time, this seemed to have no effect. I turned off calendar from notifcation menu. This seemed to help a little.

I turned data services off. This helped ALOT, but who doesnt want to use data on their iphone? I had 3 email accounts setup. One was an exchange server for my work email. I deleted all emails (gmail, yahoo, and exchange). I enabled data again. My battery life has improved extremely!

The strange thing is I had all email accounts set up for manual retrieval. I havent tested the different emails to see which is the root problem, but im assuming it was the exchange.

Summary:

Deleting email accounts improved battery life x10.

I hope this helps.

It is also a good idea to keep track of the remaining charge. That way you will not be out of juice at a crucial moment. Follow these 4 easy steps to get that going.

I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

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