3GS - incredibly poor battery life

yeah, well, of course things like push and brightness and stuff use battery.
but honestly, both my iphones get about 10 hours of STANDBY time (push active, fetch email every 30min, brightness about 25% with auto turned on) ... I mean, that's simply not enough. I'd understand a standby time of about 100hours when you consider that it fetches every 30minutes and push is turned on and stuff ... but not this. And since it was introduced on my 2G with 3.0, I guess it's a 3.0 problem

well i finally took my phone back on monday night, they gave me a new phone, there were 5 issues in total with my phone the battery being one.
this is my old stats
[IMG] http://i84.photobucket.com/albums/k12/noney82/IMG_0013.png[/IMG]
and my stats on new phone are
usage 5 hours
stanby 1 day 12 hours
battery 45% left

I've been through "The battery ****" too, having now my third iPhone (the first two replaced by Apple because of the battery issue). I've done lots of different things to the phone, checking it and trying various techniques described by people in this and other forums.

Here's what I've found out (as far as my phone is concerned) and I hope it helps:

1) Carrier settings. It seems like having the right carrier settings (ipcc file) is extremely important for the phone to operate correctly in terms of power consumption. Wrong APNs do not only influence your bill – they have an impact on the battery drain as well. It's a good idea to have your IPCC up to date and perhaps ask your carrier for a correct file (it can be manually installed and carriers usually should know how to handle it). Why is it so important? Because iPhone needs one PDP context for its normal operation. PDP context is a kind of a quasi-persistant network connection through the cellular network. It works with 3G, Edge or GPRS. And if its parameters are wrong (these come from IPCC file) your power consumption may cause a lot of trouble.

2) Push. Or more precisel - mail push. Many are saying it should be disabled but strangely there're a lot of people who claim it works perfectly fine and doesn't drain the battery. Here's what I've found out: in my case, my mobileme account's mail, if push mail is enabled, drains 5-6%/hour (in stand-by) adding at least 20 minutes of usage. I.e.: I leave the phone locked with Usage: 0 minutes, battery: 67% and an hour later it has Usage: 20 minutes, battery: 62%. So I started playing around with the settings and it turns out that the only bit that is really causing power drain is mail push (i.e. synching contacts and calendars only through push and mail by downloading every 15 minutes is a lot less power consuming). I have my mobileme account (it's an original mac.com account, but now it's obviously a mobileme one) and when I disable mail push on it – my power drain reduces to 2-3% an hour in stand-by with mail still checked every 15 minutes. I can't tell whether the actual problem is in my phone (I don't have enough fingers to count all the restarts, restores and such that I've done), in my mobile me account, MobileMail or in OS 3.0.1 itself. But there certainly is a problem. And most probably there's a mix of more problems in some of these supposed locations.

3) Given that the most common suggestion around is to reset the phone and "start from scratch", and given that most of us have an archive of texts we'd like to keep, I've found a solution to the "keeping your texts" issue (read the comments, especially the last one):

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20090624022758268

I hope this helps someone. It did help me and it does work.

4) A few things that did nothing in terms of power consumption (or did something I couldn't notice):
- disabling push notifications for applications (I've only got truphone in that category)
- disabling wifi (remember: wifi is the most power-efficient communication protocol iPhone has...)
- disabling 3g... 3g drains when it is used, but costs almost the same as edge/gprs when idle

5) A few things that I found to be useful:
- disabling "Find my iPhone". Depends a lot on your network, but in many cases it's a drainer. And, well, it's a nice feature, but not really very useful for most of us.
– running the phone down to 2%, turning it off, leaving it steady for 30-40 minutes, plugging it into the wall for a good 10 hours. it does refresh the battery. at least on a phone that's only a week old...
- restoring "anew". it made my phone faster, it uses less memory. and i've got the same set of applications...

I hope the idea about playing with push could help somebody. And I also hope these problems are resolved soonest as iPhone is a very good product and it is such a bummer one can not use it to its fullest...!

Horrible battery life, but i feel like posting my complaints is pointless since there are so many. Nonetheless i began testing my second 3gs replacement with many of the tests here brought up. I posted in the google docs for battery as well

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Av5eNah_2F8QdE40U2NMMXMyZm1wQWNCWFJ2dmZ nYWc&hl=en

Anyway with flight mode, push off, wifi off, ask wifi off, mail off and location services off as well as 3g off here is what I got.

1 Hour @90%
2 Hours @76%

It seems like it's just a power-hungry device combined with a relatively small battery.

I've had Push enabled, and the idle battery life has been pretty good. However, when I start using it to browse the web, compose e-mail, listen to music, etc., it drains completely in about 3 hours.

I just keep a charger around wherever I spend more than a couple of hours, and try to keep usage low when I'm running around.