IOS 4.2.1 battery drain

OK so just to eliminate a hardware problem, I drove 75 miles and went to the Genius Bar and swapped my phone. Aside from the fact that they gave me a bum one with a bad 3G radio that craps out and drops back to EDGE all the time (no matter where I am and the signal is fine locally) I'm having the same battery problem.

Here's what I did:

Set up the new one doing a "restore as new" while also forcing a download of a new .ipsw file at the same time, turning off push for all apps except MobileMe (which only syncs contacts and calendar anyway; no mail); making sure no apps are running in the tray at night, never running Game Center, and everything else I can think of.

When I go to sleep at night battery is at 100%. I play a podcast on the timer for 30 minutes while I fall asleep. No other apps running in tray. Mail set to only check manually. 7 hours later battery is at 60%. So how do we explain this?

ZyberSup wrote:
Basically, as I expect Apple to be a high standard of manufacturer, they should calculate the affected gadgets from the statistic method, rather than just counting the users who posted the problem here. People can expect millions of iPhones affected with this problem, not just ten thoundsands.

Apple is not counting users who posted the problem-I am. I doubt there are millions of users with the problem. There are 20 iPhones in my office NONE of them have a problem. Apple identifies the severity of problems by counting people who call with the problem or bring their phone to a genius bar. It's easy to say "If I have a problem everyone must!" But it's wrong. If you are ill and in hospital it doesn't mean that everyone is, or even that a lot of people are.

My purpose in posting is not to defend Apple; it's to help people who have a problem. And part of that help is being realistic - Apple isn't going to fix it for you unless you take it to them directly, and even then they may not. So your choice is to live with the problem, fix it yourself, or take your phone to an Apple store (or call if you have free phone coverage).

You can argue till the cows come home that Apple should fix it and you shouldn't have to do it yourself, but that isn't going to make your phone work the way it should.

Turn off Push and do it again. Is the podcast local, or streamed? Streaming uses a huge amount of power. What shows as usage in settings/general in the morning (usage and standby)?

After my second "fresh restore" I have been able to setup IMAP and manually sync contacts/calendar without the continued battery drain issue. I have it set to check every 15 minutes. While this keeps my phone from being nearly useless, I consider it an unnecessary stop-gap.

Apple needs a way they can allow users - even if via confined channels - to downgrade their software if something should break, as in my case. Since I am sure I am one of a small minority with a very specific issue, I am now forced to use a crippled phone until some day when the glitch is identified and resolved.

This battle with jailbreaking is getting to the point where it is impacting Apple's own experience. As someone who doesn't need/want to jailbreak, why am I be impacted?

It is my iPad battery draining faster. After reading through I started looking at my settings. There is a setting for "Fetch new data" it was off, but after clicking in there, I found that my two email accounts were turned "on" for fetch. I don't know if these individual settings overrode the master fetch, or the other way around. But, I turned them all off...

Hi..

I had some battery problems with my new iPhone 4. I could maybe get 2 hours of use (ipod, apps and photo) and at tops 10 hours standby.
So I tried a lot to fix it...
I found what works for my phone. It was the 3G. I parentally live in an area with bad 3G net, 1 or 2 bars. So I disabled 3G and now my latest reading on the use is 6.44 hours of use (live streaming of sports an hour, wifi, apps, phone calls and other) and 1 day and 6 hours of standby and the battery was at 16 %.

Apparently when the phone tries to stay on the 3G, it uses a lot of battery.

I hope this helps some of you.

These are all useful tips that are flying around, however, this is helping Apple duck the actual issue.

WE NEED A FIX FOR THIS ISSUE!

Why are we not putting our focus on Apple to fix what is clearly an issue. My iPhone 4 was working fine with good battery life until I upgraded to 4.2.1. I do have push mail activated. I can't always get into mail settings, more often than not the mail settings screen freezes. I need push mail set up for business reasons. The other night I went to bed with a 96% charge and when I woke up in the morning I was at 35%. No app's were running in the background and no emails came in overnight. I am an iPhone fan and have kept current with all of the new releases. I was very happy with my iPhone 4 and especially the battery life over the 3GS until I performed this update.

What do we need to do to get Apple to step up?

BTW - I also have an iPad and this is now also experiencing battery drain since I updated it.

Thanks Lawrence Finch,
his collection of possible fixes helped a lot.
I've tried everything like restarting the iPhone4, stopping background apps etc.
Then I tried the fixes Lawrence listed, starting with resetting all network settings, but without success.
Finally the delete/re-install of all mail accounts followed by a restart of the phone worked.

I had the same problem, which seems to affect all iOS Versions.

Lawrence tips were helpful. Standby/usage went from 1/1 to 1/2 but that was not enough.

After a long research I figured out, that it seems to become true that after a while there can be corrupt preferences in your Backup, especially if you move from older to newer Devices. So building up your iPhone from scratch will solve the Problem for 98% of the affected Users. Unfortunately all your Application Data will get lost as well. That was not an option for me.

Finally I found a suggestion in another forum:
*Reset all Preferences*

This will reset and delete all those necessary Prefs, that are responsible for your Battery drain, but keeps your Content and Application Data. And it will be less pain to set up some general settings. The whole Process took me 15min and now my iP4 is running since 4 days and I have still 20% with all stuff running (Push, Facetime, etc….)

So give it a try... M.

lawrance I love your excuses for Apple.. however if you are under you warranty period which some of us are .. Apple by law has to fix it now I have had 3 iphone 4 all doing the same thing over the past month even swaped out the sim card and got a brand new one from my service provider.. nothing has changed.. battery still last 18 hrs stand by on a brand new phone and 5 hrs of usage on wi-fi are you kiding me .. you send 2 text messages and it dies 1 percent every message you send out .. Garbage .. they have to fix it and soon if they don't better Business will surely help make sure they repair the product properly 🙂

Lawrence Finch wrote:

ZyberSup wrote:
Basically, as I expect Apple to be a high standard of manufacturer, they should calculate the affected gadgets from the statistic method, rather than just counting the users who posted the problem here. People can expect millions of iPhones affected with this problem, not just ten thoundsands.

Apple is not counting users who posted the problem-I am. I doubt there are millions of users with the problem. There are 20 iPhones in my office NONE of them have a problem. Apple identifies the severity of problems by counting people who call with the problem or bring their phone to a genius bar. It's easy to say "If I have a problem everyone must!" But it's wrong. If you are ill and in hospital it doesn't mean that everyone is, or even that a lot of people are.

Dear Lawrence,
I'm quite sure I appreciate your sincere helps you gave to all of the users around here, and I'm quite sure I have expressed it once. But I have never thought like what you said "If I have a problem everyone must!", as a software engineer who have ever created some bugs to users and also pointed some mistakes of users who think about it as bugs. My words about statistics should say it as yours, but for me it is in a different way. To my experience, 3 of 5 iPhone around me have got some problem after upgrade the OS.

In addition, my iPhone has got the same symptom as many around the world. Do not refer to the battery problem only, I mean the problems of sluggish scrolling of contacts and the disappearing of 'Delete' button in Messages. (I found the last one after reading the website because normally I have not delete messages myself.) And as a software engineer who normally understand how a bug might occur, I can imagine what's going on inside the OS so I expect Apple to respond on this issue rather than let

For how Apple might count their users for each problem to response, I'm sorry for my bad English that my words might mean to blame Apple already. I really do not mean it. Just a phrase to disagree yours rather.

My usage keeps running even though I have everything off. I took off my email account from phone, no internet, no wifi nothing just phone. Yet usage time is still matched with standby. Tried reseting, turning off and on. Nothing works!!! Only time usage stops is when airplane mode is on.
The phone used to work fine, I don't know exactly when it happened, but probably right after I upgraded to 4.2.
I have been doing some research but nothing is working...anyone find out whats going on??

I have 3gs

I'm also having a problem with the battery even plugged in... it would indicate it's charging but would sometimes drop to 96%... And the phone gets hot. tho I have nothing running! no email, no notifications

I then downgraded to 4.1 as described here:
http://frankleng.me/2010/12/07/downgrade-ios-4-2-1-on-iphone-and-ipod-touch/

However the problem didn't improve at all with 4.1... I think this can conclude that the battery drain has something to do with the new modem firmware 03.10.01
and for some reason it's constantly accessing the 3G network....

Calgarystar wrote:
lawrance I love your excuses for Apple.. however if you are under you warranty period which some of us are .. Apple by law has to fix it now I have had 3 iphone 4 all doing the same thing over the past month even swaped out the sim card and got a brand new one from my service provider.. nothing has changed.. battery still last 18 hrs stand by on a brand new phone and 5 hrs of usage on wi-fi are you kiding me .. you send 2 text messages and it dies 1 percent every message you send out .. Garbage .. they have to fix it and soon if they don't better Business will surely help make sure they repair the product properly 🙂

Problem is with people like you nothing will make you happy. My phone works perfectly fine and gets a **** of a lot better battery life than my daughters brand new my touch android phone. Hers would not last 2 hours and she would have to charge it continuously. When she went to the T-Mobile store they told her to download an app that kills all the open apps because unlike the iphone the android phones use full multitasking which kills the battery fast.

Oh and btw your usage is pretty normal with maybe just a tad short. Most folks get at least that much or a little better. What are you expecting from the phone? 10 hours of continuous usage? No phone, laptop, or even tablet can do that with the battery technology we currently have so quit whining and either get a life or get a new phone.