Low battery life on iPod touch after installing iOS 4

Yes, I have a 2nd generation and it's persistent. Solid answer!

Yeah, I just tried to turn my iPod on and it wouldn't come on. I haven't turned it on all day and the battery was full yesterday. This never happened before installing iOS4.

I can confirm that putting the iPod into airport mode before putting it and me to sleep seems to sort the battery issue......surely there should be a setting to do this automatically.....when I pit my iPod to sleep, I don't want it to continually use the wi-do etc. I wonder if it's related to apple collecting location data now we're on os4, and still doing so while the iPod is asleep.

Okay, like some other, I tried the airport mode overnight. That did make a huge difference. In fact, the battery monitor program I use puts it at 100%.

Overnight, I don't mind switching it to airport mode or even powering down, if I can remember. But during the day, this somewhat defeats the purpose of it being able be in a "sleep mode" and still receive push notifications. I have a couple of different programs that alert me to arrival of new messages.

The other hassle is that I can be doing non-WiFi things in airplane mode, but any time I want to use an app that requires WiFi, I have to first go into settings and switch to WiFi and then back to the app. I then have to remember to do that all again when I am done with that app. This all seems a big step backwards from previous versions.

I have sent in a complaint to Apple and suggest others do the same. I did so here:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipodtouch.html

I'm with you, FredCG! Issue and suggested fix sent to apple.......

I submitted feedback as well to me this is not a "feature" it's a bug that I used to have 3-4 days of battery life and now not even 24hrs.

Was going to attempt to rollback the OS but from what I read it is not possible.

Yes turning off the Wi-Fi manually is a option but is that not the point of sleep mode so your battery does not run down?

janericster wrote:
Same problem on my 2G iTouch with the iOS4 upgrade. TERRIBLE battery life!
at least my Touch will retain a charge longer than 10 hours while in sleep mode!

That's really strange. I upgraded my 2G iPod touch (8GB) to iOS 4, and when I fully charged the battery and unplugged it at night, a battery level app said that I had 100% remaining. About 7 hours later, it said 96%.

I have Wi-Fi on 24/7, and I know now that persistent Wi-Fi works on BOTH 2nd and 3rd generation iPod touches, but my iPod's battery is still the same as it was back when I had 3.1.3.

I had no new push notifications from 3rd party apps waiting for me overnight. If there were to be, though, would that reduce battery life?

I am having the exact same problem on my 2nd generation touch. I have tried turning of wifi to no avail. I think something else is running in the background. I never used to have this problem. I could literally go 3-4 days without charging (and that was with running Pandora about 3-4 hours each day). Now, I can't go 8 hours without the battery going down to 20% warning. This is ridiculous. Will Apple make any official acknowledgement that there is a battery issue? Give suggestions on what to do to increase the battery life? Cause turning of wifi didn't help, not to mention that seems pretty asinine on a product that has wifi. If I wanted an iPod without wifi connection I would have bought a nano or Classic.

What I do not understand, is, if the teams of extremely clever PhD’s at apple have designed iOS4 specifically for the new phone with its no doubt improved intelligent power partitioning, faster processor, bigger battery etc... What bright spark decided to have iTunes tell me that a new firmware upgrade is available for my device (a piddly 8Gb iPod Touch). Being so used to this daily routine with windows XP bug fixes, I happily clicked the upgrade button before realising the horrible mistake I had just made. Now I get none of the new features with all of the bugs. As mentioned, battery drains to flat overnight and I now find out that none of the headline features work on my iPod. This smells a little of Toyota style ‘development-by-running-around’. Yes, perhaps an unfair comparison; or is it? Still, at least no-one died and I learned two important lessons
1. Do not upgrade to OS versions with a 0 after the decimal point.
2. Do not buy an iCar.

Waiting for OS 4.01...

Field Marshall, Apple was actually very clear about the fact that not all models supported all features. We obviously have the same model iPod Touch. We don't have multi-tasking or wallpaper, but we do have folders, which for me is huge.

As to the topic of battery life, like others who have reported here, last night I put my iPod into Airplane Mode and the iPod lost absolutely no juice overnight. The difference between using it and not using it is night and day.

Update on my previous posts:

Good news -- I think (hope)!

Last evening, I decided to do another manual backup and then restore the iPod to factory settings, followed by a restoration of my last backup (did this once on Tuesday evening but it didn't make any difference). My Touch is a 16GB 2nd gen, and it contains approx 7GB of audio, 2GB of videos, 50MB of photos, 3 GB of apps, and the infamous "other" of about 225MB.

I kept the default settings of iOS4 with airplane mode "off" and notifications "on". Wi-Fi was enabled to my home network. I left it in standby all night and morning.

I have the following apps listed under notifications:

Facebook, i.TV, PandoraBox, Scrabble, Tap Tap, TicTacTouch, Words Free, YouMail, and Zillow.


It is now about 16 hours later and the battery still shows "full"!

Not sure if it took the 2nd time around to do the full backup/restore process to fix the glitch or if this is just a fluke. I will report back if the unit drains excessively again.

I would be very interested if anyone with a similar model has the same success by doing this!

A back/restore did not work for me.

However turning off push email and notifications seems to have fixed the problem. my iPod lost 0% battery sleeping overnight.

Did you do it twice? Mine didn't work after doing it once. But after the 2nd time around it did. Again, probably just a quirky coincidence that it is now working. I can't accept the fact that anybody has to turn off notifications or WiFi every night just to be confident that the device will be still powered by the morning. This is a total joke and Apple better address it in between the time they're figuring out the yellow stains and poor photo displays on the iPhone 4! 🙂

Initially I had the same problem with low battery but just deactivating Notifications/Alerts/Push despite leaving WiFi on has solved it completely. Also no other bug issues yet with OS4. Installing takes time (1-2 hours) but you get there in the end.