Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

@enx23:

I believe both types are using IMAP as protocol and both were draining my battery. I tried with both setups!

Unfortunately I can't tell if the problem is caused by an iOS bug or a change on googles IMAP servers...

Setting up an M$ Exchange Account for gmail is really easy and it supports multiple calendars for iOS.

Simply go to "Add account..." and choose Microsoft Exchange.

Type in name, email address and password.

Leave "domain" free.

As server use m.google.com.

When the account is tested succesfully switch all sliders to "on"

If you want to use multiple calendars open Safari on your device and browse to "m.google.com/sync".

Login with your google account data (in Germany you first have to change the language to English, otherwise it won't work). On the following page select your iPhone and activate as many calendars as you like.

@DJ.Jan

Thanks! For some reason whenever I create a Gmail account on my iPhone 4S I get the SMPT server. Now I deleted my Gmail accounts and added them again as MS Exchange accounts. Let's see how this will work out!

During last days I had mixed battery usage. Sometimes it can happen that even after four hours on standby my iPhone 4S is still showing 100% battery. Other times I loose 2-3% per hour in standby. I really have no idea what is going on here.

That was also my experience. Sometimes it stays with 100% for a few hours but when it once started draining battery as fast as 4-5% an hour it only stopped when I disabled my gmail account (IMAP of course).

Right now I'm with 8% loss in 6 hours and normal use only over 3G, 'cause I don't have WiFi in my office.

Have you restarted you mobile after you created the exchange and deleted the IMAP account?

I do not really know what is going on if the mail process once started draining my battery...

Let me know if you have any results.

@DJ.Jan

Nice to hear that we have the same experience (i.e. some good hours of excellent battery life followed by large battery drains for no apparent reason). If I am lucky I can get one or two days of good battery life (25% drain per day with normal usage) followed by several very bad days (80% drain per day with the same amount of usage).

Ussualy I always kill the background apps and hard reset my iPhone every time I change something in the settings just to be sure. The pattern of battery drain looks so random to me that I cannot say reliably to what it correlates anymore. The only thing which I am sure is that when Wifi and 3G are off the battery usage is fine (but as you said this is crazy for an smart phone which costs more than 600€).

One thing what I have notice is that the number of bars for 3G (top-left corner of the screen) are changing much too fast in my opinion (bad 3G coverage?).

Both POP and IMAP email types use an SMTP server to send mail.

Some here say MS Exchange makes battery drain worse, some say IMAP is worse. I've tried all three [POP, IMAP and Echange] and can report that none make my battery better or worse. My usage stats when idle are just as high under any type of email account for Gmail. I equally haven't seen any significant difference between using fetch or push, or the interval I elect to use for fetch [from 15mins to completely manual].

I hope you get the set-up that suits you the best and that your battery life gets better.

“8% loss in 6 hours” ?! So there is still some hope for us all?

I also tried all kind of settings with no success… Currently I have my one and only gmail account on push, location services set to the essentials… I charged my phone tonight and spent my all morning at the office, which means I basically did not use it for the past 5 hours: and I am at 60%

Just try to disable you Gmail account completely (all sliders OFF in account settings).

After that open mail app again and close it completely from multi tasking bar. Then restart the phone and look whar the battery is doing within the next hours.

I that works for your mobile, set up Gmail as an exchange account and you will be lucky - at least till the next update...

I don't see how this problem could be considered a HARDWARE issue, as I too, had problems with battery drain which have been alleviated by following many, if not all of the ideas put forth in this forum. Now I have good battery life.  I think the thing that finally tipped the scales in my favor was draining the battery completely, then recharging completely...twice. I say this not to diminish those who have also done all the steps and still have problems, but to say that I still believe that Apple will come through with a software....or perhaps a firmware....fix.

@xabbess

I think we have to consider the possibility that we may be dealing with a number of different issues. It does look like a lot of people are get better battery life from tunning their phone settings. However, users such as myself and 'bleepingApple'  have turned of everthing we can including WiFi, 3G, Location Services, Notifications, closing all apps  etc to such an extent that even with the iPhone set up as a bog standard cell phone we continue to see bad battery life and phantom usuage when in standby. So for some it is possible that it is hardware related.

It's an ecosystem: an OS, external apps, cloud services, external mail providers, varying carriers and network conditions etc. So there are many problem vectors obviously. Plus of course there is some percentage of devices with some hardware issues that need to be serviced. I believe as devs work on their apps, and Apple tweaks its cloud and iTunes and stuff it controls, symptoms are bound to diminish. Lots of this will never be documented and each os/firmware release will iron out more stuff, whether they acknowledge it or not.

But I've noticed a few of you haven't done the 800mb reinstall, even though you tried tons of setup changes and all. I have no documented proof of this and I don't have the phone but in my limited IT experience, each install yields a slighly different result even for a single device and the same OS. I'd try it if you haven't.

Good luck!

I didn't get a chance to edit in time. I wanted to add that aside the "macro" things i.e. OS install, "location", "notification", "mail" etc. stands "micro" things like the data itself. I don't want to make a protracted discussion about this but I remember this guy many many pages ago discussing about this single address book contact screwing up his sync process to cloud, or another one saying how a single movie trailer file that was corrupted created a loop in his syncing with the cloud or his computer. So I wanted to talk about "malformed data" or "data sanity" and this is particularly relevant when you restore from a pre-4S device. What you bring along. It's obvious for me that Apple caters to the macro stuff before the micro stuff, which is why it's important to not overlook data too. One can speculate. I think davidch's take on this, and I hope he rectifies what I say about his stance if I don't get it, is that once the drain has been controlled through a reset and charge cycles, any restore can be made and a drain cannot be created from that. He has more experience than me and has also hands on experience, which I have not. But it makes sense to me that a restore from older data could trigger a drain. Which is why it may be useful for someone under 5.0.1 or 5.0 to restore TO sth i.e. backup, then reinstall the full 800mb release, THEN restore from that backup I just talked about and NOT from the pre-5 restore. In summary someone would have restored from pre-5 (i.e. iPhone 4 for instance) to his 4S, then installed 5.0.1, then he would backup, reinstall the full 800mb, then restore from that backup. There might be a "sanitizing" virtue to doing that. This was miless's idea in the first place. It makes sense to me.

Good luck.

p.s. fair enough

i have one simple question:

Why can´t we downgrade the IOS to an older version (that works better) if the IOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 have a problem and no one solve it?

Well this is Apple they are different....

Not that I don't like Apple but I totally agree with you....

There is however something provided by the jailbrake communities that does downgrade your device.

Adam Rysio wrote:

 

Is the general conencous now that the battery problem only affects models who serial beins sit DNPG, or are other serial models having problems too?

No, I wouldn't say that. There's is no general consensus at all and we're on page 459.

What you'll find here is that there are a number of different issues and many different people trying to solve them, so lots of ideas get bounced about. You have to judge if they're valid or if they match your experience and tests. No single idea here is going to solve the problem for everyone.

The serial number may have a bearing if it turns out specific users' problems relate to hardware. Millions of 4s handsets were built, so some of them have to be duffers. If it was a faulty part or build-process then a specific factory's output might be blighted. Then the serial # will give a clue but no more than that really.

There has been a micro-chat between a few of us in the UK and Ireland [or Europe as we get labelled on here!] This discussion is focusing on either sim cards or sim card readers as a possible reason why phantom usage is occurring. We're not even that sure if this is a valid cause, however, it's just something that's being chewed over.

Go to https://discussions.apple.com/message/16930725#16930725 as a good start for a digest of the most methodical suggestions and temporary fixes.

Or read all 459 pages of fun here... [and the odd rant]

Hope it works out for you.

Here are some interesting observations with my 4S on AT&T.  My battery life has greatly improved and the last charge cylce provided me the longest charge so far.  I replaced my 4S about 10 days ago and here is a short summary of my experience:

• Virgin phone with default setting - about 1% per hour battery drain in standy-by for both WiFi and 3G.  Also the phone came loaded with 5.0.1
• Phone set-up as new and loaded with apps, email (MS Exchange and  Yahoo), 28GB of music with default settings - anywhere from 2% to 6% battery drain in stand-by
• Turned off Siri Raise to Speak, location services, notification center, iCloud off, and fetch email every 30 minutes.  I did not trigger any apps and all other settings to default.  I also did one or two battery drains to zero.  Battery drain reduced to 1% to 4% per hour in standy-by.
• Changed fetch to manual, deleted iCloud, and turned off reminders in Yahoo account. Did one more battery drain to zero and now battery drain varies from .5% to 2% per hour.   I believe it is averaging close to 1% per hour.  This is workable for me.
• I have 3 battery meter apps.  All of them typicall show 1% to 2% lower than the iPhone meter on the top left corner. 
• As others have noted, when I am connected to WiFi and I first wake my phone up from stand-by, the 3G indicator will show for a couple of seconds and then the WiFi indicator.
• Also, when I first wake up the phone from a long stand-by period, the battery will rapidly lose 1% to 3% in the first few minutes.  I believe this is the indicator just normalizing and does not mean that phone is actually draining that amount.
• Screen shot of my last charge cycle is below.  I actually made another 25 minute call via AT&T Microcell Tower after this shot and left the phone in stand-by and went to bed.

Although the phone did not drain to zero, it reset itself during the night because this is what the usage looked like this morning.  It actually showed 3% when I first woke up the phone but quickly adjusted to 1% by the time I took the shot:

Here is the systems diagnotics screen.  Looks like lots of crashes/conflicts in the last 2 days.  The battery crash is related to the the battery drain to zero prior to my last charge cycle.