iPhone 3GS with fw 3.1 – battery life gets even worse

Hi - First time poster, don't hold it against me. I wouldn't be posting at all except that I've been hit by this too, and we all have to start somewhere.

Battery life for me Post-3.1 update is *at least* half of what it was under 3.0.1. At worst, it's about a third of what it was.

Last night I did a iTunes "Restore" to reinstall 3.1 but did not restore the phone backup. I left the phone clean. Didn't re-install any Apps, didn't setup any email. Synced my music and video, forwarded all my calls to another number and left it to charge to 100%.

Took it off charge at 100%, left it in standby and went to sleep. Woke up later with the battery at ~50%, usage at ~4hrs 40m, standby reporting ~5hrs 50m.

Data counters were all still at zero - not surprising given I hadn't actually set anything up on my phone.

So what the heck has my phone been doing while it's in standby??

3G, On (Full signal, live about 200m from the mast) - Bluetooth/Wifi, Off.
Had no calls (cos they were forwarded elsewhere), no texts, and no emails (because I hadn't set them back up.)

Bizarrely, this isn't any better than when the phone was in normal use. I was getting similar usages/standby times with my email accounts setup and taking calls/texts etc. Whatever is killing the battery by cranking up the usage seems to be having far worse of an effect than normal use!

Have also noticed that charging seems to take nearly twice as long and be less "efficient" If i take a call or watch video, the battery will occasionally drop down a % or two, before climbing back up, then drop and rise again etc. When it gets to 100%, without doing anything, it'll drop to 99% occasionally, then recharge back to 100%, then get the "plug" symbol for a while, then drop to 99%. Seems to also get warmer than it used to while charging. Not hot, but definitely warmer.

Am currently restoring my last phone backup, and will then try a full discharge - won't take long! 🙂 - and full recharge cycle to see if it's a calibration issue as has been suggested. I'm a little skeptical given that the usage meter clocks up so much during standby. Unless of course it's some initial battery calibration monitoring process running in the background that's killing it. But really - how likely is that??

Sorry for the long post. Thought I'd try to include as much detail as possible.

Phil

I'll be sure to do that. I let the battery completely die again last night and then charged it overnight again. We'll see what happens today (the usage correctly reset to 0 when I turned it on this morning).

Thanks for the detailed post. I'm sure Apple employees are watching this thread, so any detailed information will be helpful.

I usually do a "Restore" when updates launch and don't restore from backup, but this time I did just do an upgrade. We'll see how the battery goes today which will probably be an especially light usage day.

Mine seems to be fine - all I can suggest is doing a restore, and seeinf if that helps 😟

I have email (POP3) set to poll every 30 minutes.

Reminds me of the Windows 95 days when an update would go wrong and you'd need to format the PC 😟

Same issues, and mine began before I installed any updates. Charged it Wednesday night to full, no calls, never use push or bluetooth. I used the ipod portion for my lunch hour Thursday and it read 24% battery left after 8 hours on standby. Installed new software, let it drain and recharged into Friday. I had 95% for most of the day with only a few texts and no calls. Everything seems fin then this morn (saturday) I am left with 44% battery life. This is my primary phone and I must agree with the general statements here, what the heck! I used make calls, play games and use the ipod and only have to charge it every few days.

So far so good today with the usage not going up by itself. The phone is currently at 98% after 10 mins of usage and two hours of standby. I have been getting a lot of emails through MobileMe, so I'm not surprised with the 2-3% lost.

Reminds me of the Windows 95 days when an update would go wrong and you'd need to format the PC

Reminds me of the Windows Vista days when an update would go wrong and you'd need to format the PC. 🙂

Went back to 3.01, all better now.

MRCUR, that's how mine was yesterday and then it lost a good majority in stand-by mode over night.

It's actually just dropped considerably in the last few minutes after a few more emails (I'm not viewing them on the device, but they're getting pushed to it) and a few texts: 93% and 22m usage. The usage is definitely growing artificially though, I've used the phones maybe 10 mins now.

I received the new iphone 3GS on Wednesday and with some heavy use including updating to 3.1 the phone lasted 24 hours on it's first initial charge.

I let the battery life drop to 20% and then recharged to 100%. Within 7 hrs of charge battery life was down to 50%.

With phone in sleep mode after 8 hrs it was down to 35% and then when woken within 1 hr had dropped to 24%. I took it off charge and switched it off to save battery life..... Within 2 hrs it had dropped to 9% and wont charge...

Apple what is going on......

Anyone had similar experiences.....

I updated my iPhone 3G to OS 3.1. 5 hours later it had no power. I recharged it over night. By mid-morning it had no power. I spoke to someone at the Apple Store and they recommended a Restore. I did that and left it in the cradle until 5pm. By 10pm it had no power. Recharged it overnight. It seemed to be working fine most of the day today and had only used about 25% power. By 2pm it has drained again.

Something is wrong with OS 3.1 -- I want to restore my phone to OS 3.0.1 until this get resolved.

Wow ... so glad I'm not alone in this. I actually am a mobile product manager, so to the folks who are bashing 'noobs', get a grip. I used to have quite a bit of standby time on my iPhone 3G before the 3.1 update. Then after the update, I noticed that I was always down at 20% battery life, even an hour after recharging my phone overnight. The phone then shuts itself down, thinking that it has no battery charge left.

I've noticed that the phone is running hot, which it never did before. But I still suspect it's a battery calibration error, unless some service is running in the background constantly. Apple needs to come out with a patch pretty darned quick - my iPhone is next to useless, when I only get a couple of hours of standby time.

I've actually installed 3.1 a total of three times now.

1. Did an upgrade when 3.1 first came out. Got worse battery life (than pre-update), so decided to:
2. Do a "Restore" and "Restore Backup". Still had poor battery life. That was when I finally decided to:
3. "Restore" and Setup New iPhone. Synced my music and videos, but not the apps. The results of that were in my first posting, ie, no good, and saw the unnatural Usage counter increasing.

As a "clean" phone didn't seem solve the problem, I restored my backup and let the phone drained. It's now on charge. If it's at 100% by midnight, I'll take it off charge and turn on airplane mode. I'm really curious to see if the usage count still climbs while locked in standby with the radios turned off.

If that still doesn't seem to work, I'll restore the phone again to new, and try airplane mode again, but this time leaving it utterly clean, no syncing at all.

I'm lucky in that I've put my sim into a another phone so I'm not out of contact, and I've put an iPhone PayAndGo sim into the iPhone now.

Will let you know the results as they happen.

If all that fails, I would dearly love to know if there's any way to restore back to 3.0.1, although from everything I've read, it's not possible due to the change in baseband (i would love to be corrected on that - particularly with step by step instructions on how to rollback!)

Cheers folks - good to know I'm not alone in this, but ****, it's frustrating.

Phil

Please let us know Phil. I'd certainly be doing the extensive testing like you are as well but I don't have another phone to be using. Hopefully Apple pays attention to what you find, it should be helpful to the engineers.