VERY VERY Poor Battery Life

I bought my phone at the end of July. 30g 3GS. Battery started draining fast within the last few days. Prior to that I was amazed at my battery life only needing to charge every couple of days unless I sat and played with the phone a lot which is to be expected. It would only drop about 2 or 3% an hour on standby. Suddenly it started dropping 20-25% an hour on standby. Tried rebooting and deleted most of my apps, but it didn’t help. Yesterday I restored to new phone, installed only my email (exchange). Went to bed last night fully charged. Dead this morning. I’m going to shut off push and see how it does, but I had push on before with no problem. Same for location services which i've always had on, but I'll try turning off. Wifi has always been off. Trying to think what changed three days ago I’m not sure but this may have started for me with the release of AT&T MMS services. If turning off push doesn’t do anything I will restore to new again and not accept the upgrade to service change. See what happens.

Something has to be wrong with the phones. I've only had mine for a week and the battery life has been great. I did the up date and the phone go blank once and took numerso times to turn on. Last night it shut off and world not turn on.
Woke up this morning and it turned on, but battery was dead(red line only). It's on the charger and working, but the battery is in a very low stat. Apple has an issue here they need to address.

I noticed a similar problems once updated to OS 3.1. It is draining faster than before even with pretty light usage. I don't know if I have MMS or not, because I updated my AT&T software and very shortly afterward, got the message that MMS was available and to update. How can I check to see if I now have MMS (beside trying to send a photo via MMS).

I have amazing battery life since I turned off a lot of features. Wi-fi is a huge one. good luck...

But the thing is that if a customer isn't happy with the version of software that was installed, the customer should have the option to downgrade. You can do it on a computer, it should be done on the phone, too. Just because Apple tries to beat hackers doesn't mean that everyone should suffer. That's what just frackin *****!

Talked to both apple and AT&T today, they won't allow me to exchange my screwed up phone for at least a refurbished one! its BS!!!!

I'm having the same problem. I believe it is from the 3.1 update. My phone can't last a day with normal use (e.g. no WiFi, no Push, no GPS) and it's drained after just a few hours.

I spoke to an Apple Tech the other day (about something else) and he told me that to extend battery life, the following should be turned off: Location Services (i.e. GPS), Auto-brightness (which I have turned off but doesn't help me any), Bluetooth, WiFi, and any Push email.

Still not helping for me... something is wrong when the phone can't last a workday with normal use.

Wow Lawrence, you seem to be on a pretty good roll here trying to make people feel foolish and trying to defend Apple's software updates.
But you had asked me "Did you see the message immediately above yours?". If I had seen it I probably wouldn't have written what I did. But apparently unlike you, I don't have the time to read every single post in a thread, and I never will. I was responding to the first post in the thread, not one that's god knows how many posts down. So maybe you shouldn't jump on someone(not just myself I noticed, and what consumer really cares about "maturity quotients" anyways?) for not reading through every post in the entire forum before they post a message of their own. We're only human, and apparently unlike you, make mistakes(which mine wasn't but I'm sure you'll feel better hearing me say I made a mistake). I'm so sorry that I offended your oh so delicate senses enough to berate me and others in a reply. Obviously we've all touched a very sensitive nerve with you on the topic of addressing apple in the forums and generally blowing off steam.
If this was a forum for correctness, understanding of maturity quotients and caring about how much work goes into updates by Apple then you would be god. But... unfortunately this is just a lowly user forum and you have to deal with us lowly users.

Cheers. 🙂

Not only poor battery life but a lot of other problems with the new firmware I can no longer get hotmail to push which it was doing on previous firmware.
Was this firmware rushed out just to try and stop Jailbraking I wonder.

You might be mistaken - hotmail has never been push - only fetch I believe.

I think only yahoo and gmail are push currently. Besides MobileMe of course.

Sixstring78 wrote:
But you had asked me "Did you see the message immediately above yours?". If I had seen it I probably wouldn't have written what I did. But apparently unlike you, I don't have the time to read every single post in a thread, and I never will.

I get it. You don't have time to read every post, but others should take the time to answer your issues so you don't have to waste your time.

This solution may have already been mentioned. My iPhone 3GS originally had very poor battery life as well. Somewhere I read that fully charging then discharging the phone 3 times would improve things. Well I tried this, and my phone now has what I consider to be acceptable, even good battery life. Fully charge your phone, then use it until the battery is completely drained and the phone actually turns off by itself. Then fully charge again. Do this 3 times. Don't plug the phone into your computer or a wall socket at any time between charge phases. Let me know what your results are.

Ok, I do not know if it helps, but given a lot of people are expressing the opinion that the problems have started with the MMS launch, and considering that MMS is one of the two major features of 3.0/3.1 update, there may be a connection between MMS activation and battery drain.

I'm going to try this myself, but this is an idea I got only now, so I can't really tell if it is going to help or not. Basically you can turn MMS off altogether going into "Preferences" => "Messages" => MMS (set to off). Boot.

Why MMS could have actually triggered battery problems? On the contrary to all the people zealously claiming here MMS has got nothing to do with it, I can actually imagine how it could've messed things up. A few facts:

1) MMS uses a dedicated APN setting (the one you've downloaded on September 25th through iTunes). This APN setting is being pushed into the baseband to enable MMS service.
2) MMS, as a service, activates a separate dedicated thread on the system process. Ok, it is not very easy to explain, but let's say the OS runs additional stuff to make MMS work.

So basically we have both baseband and OS change their behavior. Assuming 3.1/3.0 have some bugs in them that make their appearance causing power drain, coma and other weird issues (something Apple does not deny actually) it may very well be that activating MMS has triggered these issues to appear on phones that didn't have them.

Anyhow – I'm trying to keep MMS off for a while to see if it changes something. It may not help in my case, but it might be helpful in somebody else's case and I haven't seen anybody suggesting this. So... Let's try;)