VERY VERY Poor Battery Life

Same issue here. Running iPhone 3GS on OS 3.1. Phone is now running very hot, and battery life has fallen to a miserable 4 hours. I have very few apps installed (I've only had the phone about two weeks).

About ten minutes ago the phone froze, and displayed the red battery icon. I plugged the phone into my iMac, but it wasn't recognised by iTunes. I then plugged the phone into its AC adapter, and that allowed me to re-boot the phone. Once re-booted the battery was showing 38% (after being fully charged at 7:30am this morning and NO phone calls or significant usage). I then plugged the phone back into the iMac and it was immediately recognised.

PLEASE FIX APPLE!

I have exactly the same problem
- sudden step change in battery life
- 3GS, OS 3.1, UK O2 so MMS not new
- Wifi off, bluetooth off, email push just hourly, autolock 1min, screen brightness low
- something changed in past week
- fully charged, won't last till 1pm and hot on standby

Checked everything I can think of for rogue app, cant find anything

So what changed?

Have you deleted your email accounts, rebooted and added them back?

Have you turned off Notifications (as a diagnostic tool, not a permanent change)?

Have you restored the phone?

Have you restored as a new phone?

Glen9876 wrote:
PLEASE FIX APPLE!

You are not addressing Apple. You are communicating only with other users. To get a message to Apple use http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html.

I'm sure that if there actually is a problem Apple is aware of it by now from feedback and they are working on it. But you don't release an update that will affect 60 million people without very thorough testing. Even with 4 months of testing 3.1 there appear to be problems that were missed. Any time a software update is released it will fix known problems, but is also likely to break something else. In the industry the ratio of new problems to items fixed is sometimes called the "maturity quotient". It should be much less that 1 for well written software (that is, there should be fewer problems added than the number that are fixed). Consider how annoyed you would be if Apple prematurely released an update to fix your problem and it introduced a worse problem. So be patient, and meanwhile try some of the suggested fixes and workarounds that have worked for many other people.

I can't get more then a day out of my phone, and I'm not a heavy user by far. A few calls throughout the day(none that generally last more then 5 minutes) and maybe 10 minutes of internet, that's it. I had my phone charged last night to 100% when I went to bed. This morning, 9 hours later, the battery has gone down by 15% without even being used!! Apple please fix this!!!!!

Sixstring78 wrote:
Apple please fix this!!!!!

I suggest reading threads before responding. Did you see the message immediately above yours? You are NOT addressing Apple in this forum. http://www.apple.com/feedback/iphone.html if you want to communicate with Apple.

Im really ticked off about this battery stuff!
im going to get my money back, and gonna ream some ***!

led235 wrote:
Im really ticked off about this battery stuff!
im going to get my money back, and gonna ream some ***!

What a great idea! Let us know how it turns out.

I have tried everything that was suggested in one of the earlier posts and no change in bad battery. I did not have one single problem with battery life until I did the carrier settings. Since then I can't get a full 12 hours out of my battery and it's on idle most of those hours. After seeing all of these posts do you think that apple is doing something to find out if the carrier settings is what caused it. I'm still on 3.0 so I know that it isn't the 3.1 update. The only thing I have changed since I bought my 3Gs is the carrier settings.

Today my iPhone (3GS, latest software) went from 100% to power-off in 5-1/2 hours. Yes, that is correct 5-1/2 hours. During this time WiFi was off as was Location (read: GPS), bluetooth was on for approx 4 hours - until I discovered that the battery was going to bottom out before I could re-charge. During the 5-1/2 hours I made one phone call which lasted for about 20 min and received another call that lasted less than 3 min. No SMS or MMS messages were sent or received. I have a MobileMe account (read: Push email) and another email account which checks every 30 min. There is also Notifications (set to ON), but no notifications were received, nor were any expected. I listened to music for less than 10 min.

Earlier in the week I made / received about 20 phone calls (with my Bluetooth headset) over a busy morning - about 2 hrs talk time over a 4 hour period. I ended up having to plug-in the phone to the dock / charger as the battery level had dropped from over 90% to less than 10%.

I love the device or rather the promise of the device but I'm finding the battery life to be horrific. Charging the phone once per day is OK, but what I'm currently experiencing is making me re-think my decision and either return to my Sony Ericsson and iPod Touch combo or look at other smartphones.

Quesiton for the original poster - you mentioned that your wifi, bluetooth and other things are turned off - but you did not mention if your Location Services (GPS) is turned off. GPS is a HUGE battery drain.

In any event - I too have noticed that my battery does not seem to last as long as it did before the MMS update - I know this was a very small file that was updated - but I indeed have noticed faster draining of the battery. In addition - the battery percentage indicator seems to be behaving odd - it will drop down to say 25%, then a few minutes later it pops back up to 50% where it was at just a bit earlier.

yah, so, what else is new.