Level 1

0 points

3GS - incredibly poor battery life

I've had each generation of iPhone since they were launched in 2007, and upgraded from my 3G to the new 3GS a week ago on the day of its release. My experience with the battery life has been really, really poor. So bad that I sought out this forum yesterday and decided to run the battery down to zero just to see how poor its life was.

Here's what happened:

Yesterday I kept it plugged in and charged at 100% until 6 PM. I used it for ~2 hours of reading using the Kindle app and quick view of 1-2 web pages. This morning I woke up and read the news using a news reader app for ~1 hour before it turned itself off when it reached 1%.

Stats were 3 HOURS and 7 MINUTES of usage to drain the battery to ZERO. That was without calls, without video, without iPod use.

When I'm using it I can literally watch the power meter (which I've turned on the numeric percentage readout for) drain about 1% when I actually take any action on the device. I feel offended and mislead by Apple because the 3GS was supposed to have improved battery life. My netbook has better battery life (6 hours with extended battery while running its built in 3g mobile broadband service the whole time), and that's a full computer.

If you've had similar issues I'd like to hear about them and would certainly welcome any solutions that don't involve tweaking so many settings that the device doesn't work in it's default mode.

I'm recharging from the zero mark now. If the same cycle happens after another charge I feel like I'll have to return it to Apple after wasting a lot of time and simply move back to my 3G.

Given the amount of traffic on the forums about this issue, I think Apple had better speak up or they are going to experience a lot of damage to their brand.

iPhone 3GS, iPhone OS 3.0

Posted on Jun 27, 2009 6:49 AM

380 replies

Jul 30, 2009 11:01 PM in response to javaTN

javaTN wrote:
It sure does feel good to be in the ball park! The smell of hot dogs, pizza, and beer.

By the end of tonight... wow its 1 AM EST. Here are my stats with ~1% left on the battery:

5 hours and 33 minutes usage
2 days 10 hours of standby

I think its time to call it a day... and a very successful almost 3 days of iPhone battery usage!

Its likely I could milk it for more time on the clock, however once the battery is drained... then I have no way to check the usage and standby (as it is reset once plugged back into computer for charge!)

That's wild, i got exactly the same numbers tonight! 5:33 and 2days 10 hrs. There may be better, but I'm ready to stop worrying about it.

I think the battery tests we all did were fairly useful, at least we all know what the baseline is for performance among ourselves. If there are vastly better batteries out there we're not hearing about them, of course they wouldn't be reading the battery gripe posts anyway : )

Jul 30, 2009 11:02 PM in response to ahawkinson

I am very happy with my battery life overall. I have gone up to 2 days of pretty decent use without being left high and dry. I did find that my battery life initially wasn't nearly as good as it is now. I think there is always room for improvement and hopefully when 3.1 is released we'll get some of those improvements.

Tekksas

Level 1

8 points

Jul 30, 2009 11:56 PM in response to Graphics Bong

@ Gbong:

Can you tell me how much of this time you got was 3G surfing, talking, using iPod, using WiFi?

Jul 31, 2009 12:23 AM in response to Tekksas

3G was on all the time but not much surfing or talking on it, maybe 45 min. WiFi on all the time, used Safari, Maps, App store, iTunes and YouTube a total of maybe 2 hrs. iPod about 1hr. The rest was a lot of apps use, Google Earth, Weather Channel, Public Radio, Around Me, Remote, TV.com, played a lot of Flood-It and UniWar, and checked/deleted mail and texted every couple hours or so.

Oh, and constantly checked my usage and then used the calculator to figure my battery life! Probably used more battery checking my battery than anything else : )

Jul 31, 2009 12:25 AM in response to ahawkinson

I too have experienced intermitantly very poor battery life on the 3GS (and to a lesser extent on my old 3G) and I'm almost convinced it is a bug in the 3.0 OS that affects SOME configurations, and I think I have found something that could be a culprit.

For the last few days I've been watching the battery nose dive - from 100% at 8am in the morning, down to 60% by 11am with relatively light use - a bit of web browsing and checking a few emails. By 5pm that day the battery is nearly flat, if it even lasted that long.

I remember seeing this on my 3G when I first upgraded to 3.0, and I stumbled across something that seemed to "fix" it for me - enabling application push notifications - yes, ENABLING. When I first got 3.0 I had no applications that used push, so there was no way to enable it, but once I did get a push application and enable application push notifications (not mail push, which is done seperately) the poor battery life went away.

I forgot about this and recently when I've been using my 3GS a lot (maps and gps mainly) and running the battery down genuinely I decided to switch off all push notifications to "save" battery and since then the battery has been nosediving, and I've only just remembered this tip that I found before.

So I switched application push notifications ON and rebooted the phone, and since then it has been fine. I decided not to charge the phone over night, when I went to sleep it was at 88% and when I woke up 8 hours later it was still at 82% and that is with push application notifications ON, Mobileme push ON, and a 30 minute mail check of a standard IMAP account enabled. If I disabled the 30 minute IMAP mail check I think I would have got even better battery life.

My theory is that a bug in the application push notification daemon causes it not to go to sleep properly when push is disabled - so it's sits there consuming CPU resources and prevents the main CPU from going into battery saving sleep mode when the phone should be idle. Ironically enabling application push notifications seems to let it go to sleep.

(As an aside, does anyone else notice that application push notifications fail to come in if the phone has wifi enabled and is on a wifi network ? It only works reliably for me with wifi disabled...)

So anyone having this problem, try enabling application push notifications, if you don't have that option in settings, download a free app that supports push so you gain access to the push notification setting. After enabling the push notification you MUST reboot your phone - whatever the problem is doesn't seem to go away until after a reboot with push enabled.

Regards,
Simon

Jul 31, 2009 1:04 AM in response to DBMandrake

Interesting, which push apps do you use?

Jul 31, 2009 1:55 AM in response to Graphics Bong

It doesn't seem to matter what push applications you have installed, only that application push notifications is turned on - but to turn it on you need at least one push application installed before you will see the option under settings...

Currently the apps I have with push notification are IM+, AIM, Rolando2, and Prowl.

I wonder if Apple was so keen to test battery life with push notifications enabled that they didn't actually test it thoroughly with it disabled ??

Regards,
Simon

Tekksas

Level 1

8 points

Jul 31, 2009 2:16 AM in response to Graphics Bong

BTW: I did my new test and got 10h 37mins of video playing before the phone shut down.
This was my last test, I think I'm satisfied now. 🙂

noney82

Level 1

0 points

Jul 31, 2009 4:03 AM in response to glassrabbit

i forgot to charge my battery last night, looked at usage just now(12pm)52%on meter 4 hours usage 21 hours 39 mins standby. think my battery is getting better

lilcurt

Level 1

0 points

Jul 31, 2009 4:05 AM in response to javaTN

Hey thanks for the reply!

I have everything on except bluetooth and push. Saying that though I only turned push off once my battery was at around 30% an didn't notice any difference straight of the bat. Also have my brightness on around 20%.

6 hours im happy with just thought I'd check that i was getting the best i could. Must say I'm quite impressed with the phone, does everything my blackberry did and more, in a much nicer way i might add.

regards

Aibo82

Level 1

0 points

Jul 31, 2009 7:09 AM in response to ahawkinson

Hi

I tested my 3gs from last night I reset the phone back to default added a wifi network turned on,push,3g,location and turned off auto brightess and ask to join networks

Ive ran music of 82 tracks at half volume using ipod earphones in 12hrs im at 60% from 100% full charge?

This sound like a good battery?

Thanks

allen099

Level 1

30 points

Jul 31, 2009 4:54 PM in response to javaTN

To the people who get 2 days of standby time along with 5+ hours of usage, do you have Push email on?

macksta

Level 1

0 points

Jul 31, 2009 5:20 PM in response to ahawkinson

This seems to be a defective device issue. Contact your service provider for troubleshooting and the option to have your iPhone replaced if it is within it's one year warranty period.

kdrweld

Level 1

0 points

Jul 31, 2009 5:50 PM in response to Aibo82

I have 8gig,16gig 3g and both have 4 times the battery life of my 32gig 3gs i have settings the same on all and same user habits with all and the 3gs is terrible compared to the other. yesterday i had corus radio on from 6:00 to 9:00 Am and bat life went from 100% to 18% in three hours. That is with all suggested power saving settings. Ya something Very Very wrong here!

Jul 31, 2009 6:42 PM in response to ahawkinson

when you bring your iphone to apple with a bad battery how do they do test to confirm that your battery is bad?

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3GS - incredibly poor battery life