Before updating to 1.0.2, I used to get a battery life of 4 and a half hours of usage and 3 days of standby. After the 1.0.2 update, I am barely seeing 3 hours of usage and 2 days of standby max. I have turned off WiFi network finding, don;t use bluetooth, autolock my phone within a minute, pop emails once an hour automatically, have auto brightness enabled, have disabled my iPod equalizer. Any ideas why this could be happening? Normal usage would be a couple of calls, checking emails, light browsing and iPod usage. Is anyone else facing battery life problems? I searched on the forum and people said that if anything, the battery life seems to have improved 😟
I'm going to try that with my phone. If it's consistent, I should be able to charge my phone, turn it off and see the meter drop 20% when I turn it back on.
I shall try this and post my observations.... Lets see how the usage goes today. I am also somehow seeing phantom usage of my phone. Yesterday, my usage showed 2 hrs and 45 minutes. I did not make any calls today morning and have set my mail accounts to check my mails once an hour. I lock my phone every night. But today morning, when I unlocked my phone and checked the usage, it is showing 3 hours and 30 minutes. I have no page open in Safari either and do not use the iPhone alarm. wonder where the usage is coming from. Anyone facing the same problem?
This behavior (the battery meter jumping up and then being "fixed" by powering down and back up) is repeatable on my iPhone. I do it every night now.
I put the phone in the dock, the battery meter immediately jumps up, I power down, power back up and the battery meter is back where it was in the first place and I charge from there. I guess whether or not this is actually affecting the amount of charge that the battery gets is the question. It seems to because if I power down/up and charge from there, my iPhone runs, the next day, for quite a bit longer before the battery meter starts dropping. If I just charge it from where it is after the battery meter magically jumps 20%, the battery seems to run down faster, not a humongous amount or anything, but it's definitely noticeable. About 20% I guess, which is what makes me think this might be what's happening.
I will file a bug report.
That's a good idea to try powering down and back up AFTER charging to see if the meter drops back down then. I would leave it in the dock while I do that. I haven't tried that since I power down & up at night after first putting it on the dock. Definitely a good idea though, and something I want to try tonight.
So tonight I plan on placing my iPhone in the dock, the battery meter should jump up (~20%), which I don't think is real, and I will let it charge from there. In the morning, it should indicate fully charged when I press the sleep/wake button, with the phone still in the dock. I will power down and back up from that point (still in the dock) and see what happens.
My phone seems to be doing the same as Kennyboy3 has described...plugged it in and it jump at least 15-20% after showing only 20% left. Turned phone off and back on (while plugged in) and it showed the true charge of the battery. Charging at this time...hopefully this works! I was seeing a LOT less usage after the latest (1.0.2) update. Thanks to everyone who's replied...these forums have answered a bunch of questions for me!!
Glad I read these posts. My battery was also not lasting as long as before the update. I just set it on the charger, and bringing up the battery display, it was about 80% charged. Sure enough, I turned it off and on, and it was back to where it should have really read, at about 50-60%. Very unusual. I was charging every 3 days or so, every 2 days with heavy use. Since the update, was charging every 2 days, and sometimes daily. It would make sense that the indicator showed full, but the battery was not really fully charged.
Trying to explain this easily in a report to apple will be interesting. Sure wish they read these boards.
Will be going home now and will try to poweroff my phone in the dock and charge it and reset it again. As of now, my usage shows 4 hours with 2 days and 21 hours of standby. Shall report how the charging went in a couple of hours.
Ok, I went home and did the reset in the dock itself but I didn't see any difference in the charging. The battery meter didn't jump for me 😟 Lets see how this cycle goes. I am however still seeing phantom usage on my phone and somehow, the Time zone reverted to GMT when I reset the phone in the dock! Strange!
I've not seen any sign of the jump in battery metering being described here, though to some degree it may be consistent with iPod metering experience if it is happening. In iPods, the meter isn't so much an accurate reflection of battery condition as it is a sort of predictive display, based on load on the battery at any specific moment - meaning the battery will tend to read low when doing something like spinning the hard drive, then rise again once the data is loaded and the drive stops. Of course there's no drive in the iPhone, so if it works the same way the variations would be much less noticeable.
That's just a guess though, since we don't know if the iPhone's meter uses the same sort of measurement.
As to the possibility that battery life has been altered by the update, I suspect this is entirely possible. If one were to look, for example, at the reports of more stable signal since the update, it's entirely possible such was achieved by slightly altering the power levels or regularity with which the device handshakes with the tower. That would invariably affect battery life in a negative way.
I concur. The battery usage has gone up while the WiFi and call connectivity has become more reliable. This would most certainly indicate that the power levels of the antennae have been increeased for better reception. But I am still unable to understand the phantom usage stats. I deleted all the web pages in Safari and left just a blank page, turned off BlueTooth and set my mail checking to once an hour. But I still see that the usage stats increase continuously though I am not even unlocking my phone. This is sort of weird since there should be no other program running on the phone. I just hope that Apple hasn't loaded some program that uses EDGE or WiFi for probing or reporting back to their servers or AT&T's servers. I know I sounds paranoid, but nothing has been said about the previous update apart from a few Safari bug fixes and WiFi/Call connectivity. That should not account to more than a few MB (1.0.2 was more than 12MB if I recall)
Usage stats are odd things, they seem to behave inconsistently and reflect things that aren't correct. Mine have been all over the place - for example, at first my stats reflected standby time while the phone was still on charge. Now they don't do that but standby clocks up even when the phone is off. Usage also clicks up when I have no reason to believe the device has been active, but it isn't a clear situation where I can check to be sure.
I think that's one area Apple needs to provide some clarity, because standby use isn't standby if the phone is actually powered down - so if the phone counts it, why does it do that?!
I just realized that I didn't describe when it jumps exactly right.
Here's what happens (exactly):
(1) With iPhone screen off, I place it into the dock
(2) The screen illuminates showing the battery meter (say, for example, at 50%)
(3) I let the iPhone sit there until the screen goes off
(4) I press the SLEEP/WAKE button and the screen illuminates again
(5) But now it shows an extra 20% or so on the battery meter
This is where the jump is occuring for me
(6) Powering down (with the red slider) and then back up (all while still in the dock) causes the battery meter to read what it did before (50% in this case)
Charging from this point gives me the best battery performance the next day.
I would venture to guess that this does not happen on ALL iPhones because there are obviously variances among them. I'm sure that whatever it is in 1.0.2 that caused this to start happening on my iPhone (and others) was indeed a FIX for some other people who were previously having battery issues. I just wonder if it's going to be possible to have a universal fix for anything since it's becoming obvious that there are supplier/manufacturing differences in the devices?
OK, I checked my new usage stats. Its 3 hours and 58 minutes usage with 3 days and 21 hours of standby. OK by 1.0.2 standards, but before I used to get upto 6 hours of usage and 4 days of standby. Hope Apple resolves this issue in the next update 😟
