iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Follow-up to my post a few days ago…I am pleased to report that my battery draining issues seem to have been rectified.

Again, I feel the 3 most significant adjustments in my case:

- Disabled Diagnostics & Usage reporting.

- Reset Network Settings.

- Decreased auto-lock timer to 1 minute.

Also:

- Disabled 'Ask to join Networks' in Wi-Fi.

- Manually switching off the automatic time zone updates

- Slight tweak to the brightness (from ~60% to 50%)

Note:

- I did not perform any full system reset.

- iCloud backup has been on since the initial setup. (The initial iCloud backup ate the battery up considerably, but has been unnoticeable since.)

- "Notification Center" is enabled for the following Apps: Weather Widget, Phone, Messages, Reminders, Calendar, Facebook and Mail* (*My e-mail accounts are all POP3, and set to 'Push' every 15 minutes)

- Wi-Fi has always been on (I have wi-fi access ~80% of the time among home, office and Optimum Wi-FI hotspots)

- Location Services is only on for a few services (Navigon, Siri)

- I have not performed any battery 'conditioning'. (i.e. complete draining and recharge cycle)

- I do have several custom alert tones installed but they are all 8 seconds long.

Overnight draining is down to only 1-2%. I am confident that I can get through at least a whole day (depending on usage) without juicing. Sorry, I’ve yet to test the battery endurance since my tweaks. From the multitude of posts, it doesn’t sound like there is one definitive solution and I’m sure Apple is working on an OS update. Thanks for the various tips and good luck to y’all!

"The power-efficient A5 chip and iOS 5 deliver outstanding battery life. So you can keep making calls, checking email, playing video, and browsing the web."

I have an i phone 4s with at&t and have had zero problems, works great. I have another on sprint and have had the same battery issues as many others. What I just noticed this weekend is when I was home over the weekend the sprint phone worked as well as the at&t phone - no battery issue at all. I even had both with same settings with everything on, i.e. location services, etc....

so, get to work this morning and there goes the battery again on the sprint phone.

Has anyone else noticed that despite setting the fetch time to 1 hour for email it actually fetches at random intervals, all of which are much less than 1 hour !. I have a tone set for a email and have timed the intervals, its at best 40mins and at worse near enough instant, almost as though its set to push !. This def wont help my battery life !!!!

I've upgrade my first gen ipad and have seen some drop in battery life, but it's not bad. Iphone 4s is terrible. I upgrade my iphone 4 (I gave it to my daughter in law), but did not see much difference in battery life after the upgrade.

I have the same problem, probably around 15% of battery life per hour on standby. Its killing me I travel a lot and trying to charge in between flights is gonna be a big issue.

I hope there is an answer. My fear is after all this delay and silence from Apple its a hardware issue.

I've had the 4S since the launch day, and I've been pretty pleased with battery life. Until this weekend. My phone just went from a full charge to empty within <14h standby time and about 95 minutes of lite usage (internet, angry birds, a couple text messages, all on wifi).

The major change that I made since the battery started going wild is turning wifi syncing on. I'm not certain that is it, and I need to get back to my iMac in order to be able to turn it off (can't turn it off from the phone). The phone says the last sync came back when I'd have expected it (when it was plugged in), but the phone is hot all the time now and the battery behavior is nothing like it used to be (I could usually go through two full days of lite usage or more than a day of heavy usage per charge).

TonyLukes3,

Hey I just did what you did, only difference is I shut off Time Zone since when I went into location services it was a "purple" arrow as always on. I will test now to see how it goes.

My phone was getting fairly hot before too.

TonyLukes3 wrote:

I just enabled my Exchange account, and will be tracking that. Since adding it about 10 minutes ago it's already dropped 4% just pulling down all my emails over WiFi, although I have all of my folders sync'd (about 35 with a few hundred emails). The mail app is open right now and the spinning data icon is still going so it may be getting stuck somewhere because all of my emails have now been downloaded. Dropped another percent just now lol.

I'll see how it goes and post back later on today. Seems like Exchange was the culprit for me and perhaps the iCloud Photo Stream & Docs/Data.

I found that having my exchange on push was the culprit - once I changed it to Fetch every 15 minutes, it was dramatically better. I also recall that before I did that, under Settings\General\Usage\Time Since Last Full Charge, the usage was identical to the standby -- and it was about 6 hours before it was fully discharged. Since turning off push for exchange (which admittedly we shouldn't have to do, but until there's a fix...) my usage is 3 hours 17 minutes with Standby 22 hours, 50 minutes -- and 28% battery left. Before doing that, standby would not last longer than 6-6.5 hours. I suspect it's something with either contacts or calendar and the way exchange interacts with iOS5 as far as push is concerned, and probably a specific type of entry(or entries) in an individual's exchange calendar or the like that is triggering the server to constantly push information to the phone, keeping the phone active at all times.

After 158 pages of tips and tricks that have done virtually nothing, I have come to the realization that we are just going to have to wait for a fix from APPLE on this issue. I have gone back into my phone and turned everything back on that I had disabled.

I have a charger on the desk in my office, a charger in the car and a charger next to my chair at home. I'll have no issues keeping my phone going for the most part, while waiting for the fix.

So far, since I turned everything back on, there have been no additional negative effects on my phone. It APPEARS to use the battery up in spurts. I unplugged at 100% @ 6am. By the time I reached the office at 7:30am, I was down to 89%. Now, sitting here at 10:30am, I'm at 82%. I'm showing 1:04 of usage and 4:35 of standby at this point.......

I'm comfortable that APPLE is aware of the problem and expect a FIX at any time. I can wait it out till something is released.

Thanks for the suggestions.

I disabled Time Zone, Location based iAds and Diagnostics & Usage. Went to bed and the phone was @ 100% charge. Nearly 10 hours later I've only lost 5%. This seems like a significant improvement for me. I have checked mail on the phone a couple of times this morning but still holding strong @ 95% I should add that WiFi and Bluetooth are both ON. I am using Gmail with a 15 min push. Maybe I'm lucky or perhaps experiences with my old mobile device were that much worse. Hopefully there is a fix soon, the number of complaints is undeniable.

I have a new iPhone 4S - arrived the first day.

Interesting findings on my battery drain. At my house where I have a Trednet DualBand-N WiFi AP, the drain on battery is terrible - approx the often reported 10%/hour. Also, interesting to note, the device sits on the same desk as the AP - about 1ft away. At the office, where we have Aruba DualBand-N AP's, the drain doesn't seem bad at all. In both cases, the device is mostly idle (other than messages coming in, alerts, etc, but not much human interaction).

So, could there be a dependancy on the actual Wireless AP? Or the type of WiFi auth/security. At home, I use straight up WPA2, but at the office we use 802.1x.

Not seeing this problem on the iPad2 that did get upgraded to iOS5, so it definitely seems to be something on the iPhone4S...

My new iPhone 4S is a huge disappointment when it comes to battery life. I started off with a 100% full charge this morning and am now down to 35% at 14.30 in the afternoon. I have had to turn everything off, disable the Setting Time Zone service and yet System Activity Monitor says that I've still got only 3 hours 18 minutes of battery life left. I begin to wonder what the point is in having a phone such as this one if you can't take full advantage of its possibilities. I also do not understand how my two-year-old 3GS could have fared so much better in terms of battery life than my brand new 4S. Please, do keep us updated on a fix for this!

OK, maybe I am one of the few lucky ppl out there, which I doubt. But I dont think I have problems with battery with my brand new iPhone 4s. I have nearly 180 apps installed, 3 emails configured (fetches every 15 minutes). I shoot alot with the camera, edit images, & share on different apps. Today specifically I decided to put my phone to the test. So since 07:00, till 16:30 I didn't charge my phone, heavily abusing it (apps but not phone calls). At 16:30 when I arrived home from work, I got alert that battery is running low (20%). I spent the next 15 minutes playing videos until it was drained. & now am charging it. So based on my experiences with iPhone 3G, 3Gs, & iPhone 4, the 4s seems to be the only phone I used that stayed 9 hours without need to charge. I have to point out that part of my testing today included on 2 brief short phone calls. The rest of the testing was just data, cam, edits, music, streaming vids, apps in general.

OK - have tried two things that have massively improved my battery- but just not sure which is the one that worked best! I was also losing about 10% an hour. I first disabled the 'setting time zone' feature in Location services that people have mentioned a few times on here. I also changed my mail from 'push' to 'fetch' every 15 minutes. It is now 14.30 and my phone has been on since about 7.30am and the battery is at 75%. It would have almost defeinintely been far far lower by now if I had not made the changes, likely around 20-30% left.

I will likely turn one of these back on to isolate the source of the drain but it is a really significant improvement from last week. If you have not disabled the 'setting time zone' them simply go to:

Settings- Location Services - System Services - Setting Time Zone