3GS - incredibly poor battery life

I brought my phone in to the Apple Store today. Not a very satisfying experience. First the guy plugged my phone into a system and ran diagnostics showing that there were no software or other issues. Then he took it into the back room to check the battery and came back in 2 minutes and said it was fine. I asked him what he did and he told me that they put it on a meter to "see how much current is being delivered by the battery". This would check to see how much current is being drawn by the phone and that the battery is able to supply power, but it will not say anything about the capacity of the battery.

After he told me that everything was OK, he proceded to tell me that my settings were not "optimized". He told me in order to get good battery life I had to turn wifi, bluetooth, push and location services all off and leave them off except for when I actually use them. The battery life would probably be good if I turned the phone off too... but that kinda defeats the purpose.

I don't think that I am being unreasonable. I charge the phone every night and I expect the phone to last for a day of "typical" use. The iPhone and the 3G both easily did that for me. THe 3GS hasn't been close.

I do have some good news. iStockManager updated two days ao and my battery life seems to be improved, but not fixed yet. I am not sure how it would effect the phones battery life when I didn't even run it, but it did say that the new version contained an fix for improved battery life. Today, I made it a full day for the first time with this phone. The remaining % display is still erratic. It is not uncommon for it to run down and then jump up 15-20 points. For example today it ran down to 55% and the next time I took it out of my pocket it said taht 75% was now remaining.

Still something clearly not right - despite what the "genius" says.

I did another test last night - I've updated to 3.0.1 although I don't think that has any effect on the situation as they only patched the SMS exploit, the phone was fully charged when I went to bed at midnight, I had the following settings:

Wifi Enabled, Notifications Enabled, MobileMe Push Enabled, 30 minute mail check on an IMAP account Enabled, Location Services Enabled, 3G Enabled, Bluetooth Disabled.

The only one of the "power consuming" settings that I have disabled is Bluetooth, which I always leave disabled anyway.

This morning at 8am after 8 hours of standby the battery was reading 96%. The only setting I have changed since I was getting terrible battery life a few days ago was turnning application notifications ON.

Seems like a bug to me...

Regards,
Simon

DBMandrake wrote:
This morning at 8am after 8 hours of standby the battery was reading 96%. The only setting I have changed since I was getting terrible battery life a few days ago was turnning application notifications ON.

There has been wide speculation that Push email in OS 3.0/.1 takes alot of power, which wasn't the case in previous firmware versions. I would encourage you to re-run that test again overnight, except this time, turn Push email off. Leave Fetch for 30 mins, or if you really want to check the battery, turn fetch on to manual, but I'd say that's unrealistic. If you're able to re-run this, do let us know what you get.

I think you missed my point - as far as I'm concerned, a mere 4% loss of battery for 8 hours of standby with push enabled is GREAT. With the problem I was having before with notifications turned off, the battery was draining down to less than 60% over 8 hours with NO USE. That's what I think the bug is. Even with push email turned off the battery was draining down to 60% over night.

I'm sure the battery will last even better with push email turned off - I'll try to remember to do the same test tonight, but I'll leave app notifications ON. (So the only setting I'll change is mobileme push off)

Regards,
Simon

Ah, my apologies. Yeah, I guess sarcasm or "tone of voice" is difficult to decipher over text sometimes 🙂. The "seems like a bug" statement fooled me. And of course based on what you said, it's great that the phone is now working out for you.

On the flip side, I had my iPhone exchanged last night because it wouldn't really last me more than 16 hours of standby. That's not really close to the 300 hours Apple promised, or even the 2 days that some were mentioning on this Discussions forum. I'll check back in with some test results after a few days. It's a service part (white-box) replacement, and not a retail box. Some folks have been having good success with these phones. Hopefully this is the case.

ive just sent my 6 week old 3GS off for repair, im really not happy it was working one minute the next battery was dead, i tried charging it for 6 hours and it didnt even turn on! i mean im paying alot of money for something that doesnt work, and my network carrier isnt very helpful at all this is the third i iphone i have had and they have all broken, as you can guess already im not happy

ok i reset and restored my phone as new and did extensive battery testing. for the record it is a 3GS / black / 32Gb and i received it June 19th. ordered via apple's online store.

to reset and restore my phone, i followed macho_man's instructions here (bottom of page):
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2059987&start=210&tstart=0

i also refrained from syncing or putting anything on this new phone so that it was just the core basics. that includes the OS 3.0.1 update. i'm running 3.0 for all these tests.

after my phone was charged to 100% for the first time i did the Brightness Test that Graphics Bong came up with. i then finished running the phone down to 0% on my own, recharged it back to 100% and commenced with Tekksas' audio test overnight. below are my results for both tests.
(i've also posted my Brightness Test results over at javaTN's google doc: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Av5eNah_2F8QdE40U2NMMXMyZm1wQWNCWFJ2dmZ nYWc&hl=en )
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Brightness Test Settings:*
wifi off
airport on
brightness 100%
auto-bright on
vibrate on
auto-lock never

*Brightness Test Results:*
1 hour: 91%
2 hours: 77% (dropped to 77 with 3 seconds to go)
3 hours: 63%
4 hours: 49%
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Audio Test Settings:*
wifi off
3g off
location services off
push off
sound on ~50%
apple headphones plugged in
screen brightness ~50%
timer set to 8 hours
audio file: "Introduction to Political Philosophy No. 23" on repeat
once everything was in motion i locked my screen and let it run

*Audio Test Results:*
82%
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

i propose these tests be run in the 4 different modes the phone can be in:
Airplane
Edge-only
3G
Wifi

only then can we truly see what effect each mode has on battery time (if any) and isolate which mode could be the problem. i theorized in a previous post that my battery drainage was due to the phone dropping my wifi signal, not picking it back up and sticking on 3g—thus constantly pinging the 3g network and draining the battery. if that were the case then any of these tests done with 3g ON should see a significant loss in battery compared to the others. then we can speculate whether this is a software problem or a hardware problem. if software, maybe restoring the phone or installing an update fixes it. if hardware, maybe 3G chips in these early batches were problematic and we just need new phones.

i've had every iphone to date and each time i get a new one i installed the backup from my old phone. maybe there was some corrupt file that got carried over each time resulting in legacy issues. if restoring the phone as new fixes my battery problems this may be the case.

also, i wish i had performed these tests before restoring my phone as new so i could compare results. i may go back and restore my previous phone settings (with all of my apps, notes and everything else) and run these tests again to see if there are any differences.

I think it's interesting that there's an initial 9% drop in battery the first hour, then a steady 14% drop each consecutive hour after that.

The fact that most of us have gotten very similar numbers on the brightness test over 2 hours suggests that our batteries have comparable characteristics, but when wireless/network services are turned on then we see the erratic behavior. I wonder what kind of battery life people are getting who don't have 3G where they live? If you aren't in a 3G zone but you have 3G on does the phone continue to sniff for 3G? Is it worse or better than being in a weak 3G zone with low signal?

If any of you run the brightness test with 3G on, make sure to take note of your signal strength and post along with your results. I'll try to do it today.

It seems to me that it's not the batteries that are at fault with people getting poor results (except in isolated incidents) but rather that the battery drain when the phone is "idle" is much higher than it should be for some people, due to software bugs.

There are roughly 3 levels of power drain that the phone can experience depending on the state it's in - the maximum power drain would be when the phone is "awake" and running a highly CPU intensive application - for example certain types of games. In this state the battery would literally only last 2-3 hours.

The next lowest is when the phone is "awake" but idle. An example of this would be the brightness test that people have done where the auto-lock is disabled so it sits at the home screen. The CPU is mostly idle but not asleep, the backlight is on, etc. In this state the battery would last roughly 8 hours.

The lowest power state is when the phone is "asleep", and it's here that I think most people are having problems. When no applications are running and the screen is locked the phone should go into an ultra low power standby mode, and in this mode the CPU is actually stopped entirely, waiting for interrupts from other devices to wake it. This is akin to putting a PC in suspend, and it's only by way of this ultra low power mode that you can get long standby times of hundreds of hours.

Things that will wake the CPU are things like the real time clock - which will start the CPU periodically to do a scheduled mail check, ring an alarm/calendar reminder etc, or the home/sleep buttons, or a signal from the cell modem which will wake the cpu for incoming SMS/calls etc.

Anything which will prevent the phone going into this ultralow power mode, either sometimes, or entirely will DRASTICALLY reduce the battery life, as the phone won't go into standby mode properly.

If the phone never goes into low power sleep mode then the standby time will go from hundreds of hours down to about 8 hours, and that's assuming that the phone is not used.

One of the biggest culprits seems to be push notifications - for a couple of reasons. The first is bugs - 2.0 had a bug where the phone didn't go into low power sleep at all when push email was enabled, thus the phone could barely last 8 hours even with light use, this was fixed sometime between 2.0 and 2.2, I remember that 2.2 had good battery life with exchange push. 2.2.1 seemed to partially reverse this and push mail battery life got a bit worse again.

3.0 seems to have the same kind of bug again now that application push notifications have been added. There are now TWO push technologies running, the application push notifications, and email push notifications - for mobileme or exchange, and they run seperately and in parallel.

For me at least, mail push doesn't seem to cause high battery drain, I can enable mobileme push with very little battery penalty. However I have problems with the application push notifications - with the irony being that turning application notifications OFF gives terrible battery life for me - exactly opposite to what you would expect, and CLEARLY a bug.

It seems that with application notifications off, something (probably the application notifications daemon) doesn't allow the phone to go to sleep properly thus the battery drains fast. If I turn application notifications ON (and then reboot the phone) I get great battery life again. Hopefully this will be fixed in 3.1.

There is another issue with any kind of push that is not a bug but can still cause poor battery life with push enabled - and that depends on your phone carrier. The issue with push is that it keeps an active cellular IP address on your phone at all times - without push the iPhone shuts down the IP connection to the internet after approximately 5 minutes of being idle, however with push enabled the IP address is kept active constantly.

The problem with this is that if your cellular provider gives your phone a public ip address without any firewalling, any unsolicited incoming traffic will cause your cellular radio to transmit, thus draining the battery unnecessarily.

There is so much random unsolicited traffic on the internet these days due to worms scanning, people doing port scans and so on, that the chances of random packets hitting your ip address are quite high and every time that happens with push turned on the transmitter is draining your battery, and although I'm not certain I believe that even a single ip packet received will wake the CPU from its low power sleep to deal with it before it goes back to sleep, causing a double whammy in battery drain.

When I was using my phone on Vodafone New Zealand, they provide different APN settings that affect the way you're connected to the internet - some are firewalled for incomining connections and some are not for example. And when I changed my APN from an unfirewalled one to a firewalled one (which blocks unsolicited incoming connections) the battery life with mobileme push email enabled DRASTICALLY improved to the point where enabling push email had hardly any penalty.

Since different cellular providers around the world will have different setups - I wonder if some giving firewalled and some unfirewalled internet access to iphones could be one of the differentiators in battery life for people in different areas ?

Regards,
Simon

Many of you have talked about turning application notification off. Is this an application specific setting? I have not been able to find anywhere in the settings whre I can turn notifications off. Any help is appreciated.

I did the brightness test again, this time with 3G on, and I was at 90% over 1 hour, same as first test with 3G off. My city has pretty good 3G coverage but my office at home where the phone was for the test only gets 2 bars out of 5. I would have expected more of a drain if poor 3G signal is part of the equation but it didn't seem to affect it at all.

My battery percentage. Wifi tuned on and brightness set to 30%. Push tuned off.



Message was edited by: samven582

Notifications is directly on the first page in Settings, but it only appears if you have at least one push notification enabled app installed. After installing an app that supports notifications and allowing it to receive notifications you'll find that setting in Settings...

Regards,
Simon

I picked up my shiny new 3GS around 3 weeks ago, and had horrible battery life from the first day. I contact Apple support - they had me check the usual - brightness, email push, etc. Then they recommended a trip to the "Genius" bar. Did that, the "genius" said I had a hung application and that I should do a daily reboot. Did that for 2 weeks as well as running the battery completely dead, then recharging several times.

Still horrible battery life, so I did a complete re-install of the OS and apps...didn't help.

Went back to the "genius" bar today and they handed me a new 3GS w/out questioning me further.

Did a full charge at noon, and 1.5 hours later, at 99%.

Seems to prove to me that I had a defective unit. This one is great!

can someone tell me if this is a good battery

WITH TEXTING AND ABOUT 45 MINUTE CALLING PERIOD FOR TODAY

BATTERY AT 76%

USAGE: 1 hour 39 minutes
STANDBY: 2 hours 42 minutes

3G OFF LOCATION OFF PUSH OFF WIFI ON