Battery Issues with 3.0.1

Well, it can't be - at least not through any official means. Google is your friend.

HOWEVER, the problem is not 3.0.1 - it is the update process. If it fails or causes problems for 3.0.1 it will likely do the same restoring 3.0 also.

Lawrence speaks the truth. The fault cannot be with OS 3.0.1, because many of us are using it without experiencing any change in battery performance from 3.0. Something went amiss in your updating process, so a Restore -- perhaps as a new phone -- is your best bet.

Phil

If the update failed there is no firmware on the phone, so it is essentially "removed". Unfortunately, 3.0 is removed also.

If the update completed then the only firmware on the phone is 3.0.1; if you remove it there will be nothing, not 3.0.

3 days old Iphone 3Gs 16Gb, and I did overnight charging to 100%. After I took off the USB cable, the battery gauge percentage drop to 98%. HOW WERID!!

My 3GS battery has been draining faster since the 3.0.1 update as well.
I tried turning off 3G and also turning off Bluetooth for most of the day and it's going down faster than before.
Right now I have 92% on my battery after a full night's charge and my usage is 49 minutes with 2 hours, 5 minutes standby. The usage was listening to the iPod for 20 minutes or so and 16 minutes on the phone (3G off).
I would like to try the restore but I'm pretty sure I will lose all my app save data (games, etc..). The main one is I have been dieting for about 4 months now and I'm using Lose It! to track my calories and progress. I don't want to lose all that data.

Not weird, but not right either. The two most likely possibilities:

1, Your battery gauge needs calibration. To fix this run the battery all the way down until it shuts off; keep going at the 20% and 10% warnings (games are good for this). Then charge with the wall charger (not a USB port) for 4 hours. If you see this again (an immediate drop after disconnecting without using the phone) then see 2.

2. You have a bad battery. It happens. Take it to an Apple store and they will replace it.

I dont know if my battery is good or not.
Yesterday I thought I made total 2 hours or so calling, and a little bit surfing, total standby hour is 1 Day and 7 hours, and i still had 30% battery left. However I was scared that my battery would be running out soon before noon, so I did put my USB and charged the phone through the computer. This morning, I took off the usb cable( about 6 hours charging), and the battery showed 98%, and after receiving 2 sms with 50 mins standby, 9mins usage, the battery is 97% now. I have 3G on, BT off, location service off, no pushemail.

my battery life dramas aren't quite so epic as some.. i lose about a percent a minute when using a 3g application such as facebook which is still a third of what it should be. with brightness dialed right down and no push notifications on...standby time is still good..and shouldn't you just be able to chuck the phone into DFU mode, connect it to itunes and cmd/shift + restore it to select the 3.0.0 firmware to downgrade?

forgot to mention i have restored as new about a thousand times...and my battery takes an epically long time to charge..like 3-4 hours to charge on ac power

It depends a lot on signal strength. The specs say "up to" 6 hours for voice and data. That is with a strong signal. As signal strength decreases the phone increases its output power to compensate for the greater distance to the tower. Each bar lost roughly (very roughly) doubles the required transmitter power. So if you consistently have 3 bars your battery life will be about half of the maximum.

3-4 hours is what it should take to recharge from a low level of charge. It will reach 80% in the first hour, then charge more slowly to protect the battery until it reaches 100%.

I'm another new iPhone user experiencing the same battery jumping problems described since the 3.0.1 update. I took the phone on holiday prior to the update and thought it was bad enough having to charge it nightly. Since the update, the battery level drops rapidly,jumps and cuts out. Have tried restore from backup without luck and then phoned Apple who got me to restore as a new phone. Still no improvement so I'm swapping the phone on Monday.

The battery life is shocking on this device and has marred an otherwise very pleasant experience of being an iPhone owner. (Now, the only other 'vital' fix is to let the procamera app pass Apple testing so we can have a zoom feature that should have been included in the first place!)

StuartH wrote:
(Now, the only other 'vital' fix is to let the procamera app pass Apple testing so we can have a zoom feature that should have been included in the first place!)

HUH?! rather off topic. But I am very pleased that the iPhone does not have "digital zoom", which is simply a hoax. There's no such thing as digital zoom, it's really "crop on the fly under pressure"; all it really does is crop the picture at time of taking, rather than at your leisure using a photo editing program.

Just a few comments on these issues...

I have had several odd issues with my 3GS battery but many reminded me of my original iPhone. Lithium-polymer batteries need some initial exercise in order to get them working properly, whether an Apple product or that of anyone else. Apple products also need to see a couple of deep cycles initially to calibrate the battery management software. In time and with use, a lot of these issues simply go away and good battery life is the result.

However, I applied the 3.0.1 update while out of town on business. It took over an hour to download the installation package via a hotel's crummy service. When it installed, I noticed that it seemed to shortcut the white progress bar at about the 50% point. I thought nothing of it until I started getting bizarre battery indicator results and came here. My battery would drop to 98% immediately after taking it off charge. Then it would drain very rapidly down to 64% after 42 minutes of email and web browsing with the screen at about 45% brilliance. Way too fast. Then I could let it go to sleep, turn it on again and the indicator would be back to 90%. One day without any warning it went into a hard shutdown - just dead. When I charged it, after coming off the "don't touch me" low battery charge, it showed over 50%.

The fix was to do a complete reset. This time the 3.0.1 took a long time to install and the progress bar went all the way to 100%. Everything migrated back except emails of course. My app settings and SMS messages were fine. Since, I can leave it off charge but on all night and it will only be down to 97% in the morning and there is predictable, linear battery drain as it is used. GPS is a power hog - so don't expect great battery life when using it, but apart from that, I'm getting about the same reliable battery life I had with my original iPhone.

I've found something completely different with mine and it has nothing to do with the restore/reset process...

I've found that since the 3.0.1 update, the phone drains battery whenever it switches back and forth from 3G to Edge...If I use it all the time in Ann Arbor, for example, which is fully saturated with a strong 3G signal as well as plentiful wireless, everything works exactly as necessary - It rides around in my pocket all day happily connected to 3G or wireless at work and after a day of using the phone I still have a good 70-80 percent battery left at the end of the day.

BUT -- the moment I travel out of the area, where the signal switches to EDGE, the phone starts dropping battery power about 10 percent an hour -- within a day the battery is next to dead even when it is never used.

I've been able to recreate this on every single trip out of the area, wherever the signal keeps switching back and forth between 3G and Edge -- it's almost like the actual searching for the signal is what drains the battery...after recreating the problem it isn't like "almost", it is absolutely 100% related to the iPHone searching for the signal.

I've found that switching off 3G while traveling and using only Edge completely resolves the problem. I turn the 3G back on when I get back into areas that are 100% 3G (which is almost all of SE Michigan, but almost none of neighboring areas)...