4.3.3 battery life

@David

The apps can have bugs and crashes in the processes and background level that are unnoticable in the user interface, you will just feel your phone getting hot and that's how you know somethings wrong. However I am not suggesting that was the problem you are experiencing.

How did you notice that the battery drainage started "as soon as" you upgraded? Did you stare at the battery meter and then it started to go down faster than normally right away after the iOS install?

prior to 4.3.2 two days before charge... updated to 4.3.2 and i get 1.5 days if im lucky..

My phones doesnt get hot either

And no I didn't stare at the battery level I'm far too busy and not that sad!

If Apple released a statement saying black was white, the fan-boys would argue it was.

I'm bored now.

Ok what you can try:

A.

1. Plug your iPhone onto your mac, backup your iPhone and eject.

2. Plug in your iPhone again and press the 'Restore' button to do a full restore (it's gonna do it from your last backup, so no need to worry)

B. AFTER THE RESTORE

1. Kill your applications from backround always when not needed.

2. Turn off Bluetooth, Cellular Data & Wifi when not needed.

3. Restrict Location Services from the apps that don't need it. (Offcourse you wouldn't want to restrict location services from 'Maps' app for example).

4. Don't use Push e-mail, use Fetching instead by fetching every 30min or less

5. Make sure your screen brightness is not too bright at all times.

6. Calibrate your battery by letting it drain until iPhone shuts down, wait 10 minutes, and then charge it back to full - repeat this procedure at least once a month!

THEN

Next time you go to sleep, mark down how much you have battery life at night and then how much in the morning. For example if the loss is around 5% - 7% overnight, you are fine! P.S offcourse make sure to press home button before going to sleep to make sure you have no apps "active" over night.

See if that helps..

@ Magic. When I was having battery issues in my previous phones, I tried all tips. Including the ones you mentioned. Nothing worked. Replacing SIM card, turning stuff off (which really is kind of dumb since some of the features of the iPhone require to have these things on. You shouldn't have to put your self at an inconvenience just to save battery life, when you didn't have that issue before and all those things were turned on).

Not sure what David did with his phone. But for me, I knew how fast my batter drained on the amount of usage I did on previous iOS. With normal day to day usage, my battery would go down to about 65% by the time I got home from work (about 7pm). But after the update, I noticed it dropping down to about 50%. Even after 3 days of just replying to text messages, I still found my phone dropping down to 55%. Happened on all 3 3GS phones, even after several restore from scratch. No changes to settings or network. Even deleted apps as suggested by some.

Sometimes, issues just can't be explained or fixed. Unless you upgrade to a newer model. But even then, as many post here, once you update the iOS on those phones, you can experience issues again. Such is technology. When it works it works great, when it doesn't, it's very frustrating.

I buyed Iphone4 after 3g also because of battery duration as Apple says (lying) on tv spots.

I don't want to spend my time closing apps and connectivity functions!

@Eric I don't know when this what you mention was, but at the time when iPhone 4 was released, Apple adjusted the battery meter leveling couple of times in iPhone 3GS (and early iPhone 4). Other thing is that you might not have calibrated your battery for a while? Or it is possible that you just had an faulty phone!

@Lysergic those methods mentioned above are the "extreme" measures to see how long can you make your battery last - you don't have to follow all of them if you don't want. I don't follow them all and I get 36h-48h of battery life usually, unless if I have to use it more than usual offcourse. However if I speak / listen to music / surf a lot, the battery might not last more then 8 hours for example. Gaming is the worst, it is a definite battery drainer.

You don't have to kill apps from background either if you don't want, but eventually it will eat up your memory. Your phone will work nonetheless, but it will become more stuttery in time and the performance will decrease. This is something you always notice when trying an iPhone / iPad in a public place, they are always extremely slow as there are 50+ apps running in the background.

A good method perhaps would be to turn the phone off/on every other day or something like that to clean up the memory once in a while..

Magic_Oskari wrote:

You don't have to kill apps from background either if you don't want, but eventually it will eat up your memory... they are always extremely slow as there are 50+ apps running in the background

That's not how I understand iOS "multi tasking" works.

Certainly when the ram is full the phone uses slightly more battery, but not a significant amount.

http://whenwillapple.com/blog/2010/04/19/iphone-os-4-multitasking-explained-agai n/

So even if there are 50 apps in the multitasking bar, does not mean that all 50 are active, or even running a background task.

Notice how there are still apps in the multitask bar after a restart; and yet if you run a system check program such as 'Activity Monitor Touch' you can see nothing is running.

My iphone will only eat batteries if I have a program that has locked up, or is stuck in a background render; which is rare.

I have checked my battery usage with low ram active (there are 4 states of ram: Wired,Active,Inactive,Free)

Then I tried with my ram almost half active, and only around 3% free.

Battery usage was almost the same; I can't notice a repeatable difference in 6 hours.

Certainly running background tasks like facebook and Skype will use up battery.

But if you run something larger it will "kick" those apps off.

Oddly, I have found just having my phone running (that is not rebooting any time) will raise battery usage over time; like over a week or two.

Running a memory cleaning app will help, but about once a week, sometimes once every two weeks a reboot is needed.

My guess is that the multitasking system gets bogged down over time, and a restart fixes it.

Last night I updated to 4.3.3, and found that my battery this morning has lasted longer.

But then my phone did restart, and that often makes it last longer as the iOS hasn't started too many background tasks.

Out of interest if my iPhone has to search for cell towers, or connects and disconnects with wifi often then my battery also runs down faster. But this is obvious.

Recently my work wifi was bogged down with other users transferring lots of data, which meant it ran super slow. So my iphone must have been taking much longer to download mail and do background internet tasks; and the battery was really hit then as I assume it needed to constantly talk to the router to get data.

@kiwi Apps in the background are not fully active, but they still eat up memory and lower peformance. If someone doesn't believe me, download an app called "System Status" (for diagnostics), look at your memory with no apps running, and then start up 10+ apps, put them in the background and load up "System Status" again and see how much you got memory left..

Now, it is possible the it might not drain battery any more than memory full, all I was claiming is that it will lower your phone's performance. Your phone will get stutters and jerkiness etc..

The iphone needs to always power the ram, regardless if it is used or not.

But in my experience ram usage does not significantly eat battery usage.

The processor usage is what will eat battery.

And also the processor working hard to share ram will slow the system.

Over time the iOS needs to work harder to determine what apps should give up ram, and what apps should be allowed to keep it. This eats up processor cycles, and so this uses more batteries (and also explains why the old iphones don't do this "multitasking" good (they need to run a program and also run a background task of trying to optimise ram and processor usage, which inturn uses processor cycles).

I assume that over time Apple is able to better optimise this process, and so less processor and thus battery is used.

Actually what I have read is that some apps do drain battery life on the background, I guess most wont. Some apps do use specific multitasking APIs which will result in battery drain. These APIs provide services through the OS, so it still isn't really the app that is using up resources, but they have instructed the OS to maintain some service which will use CPU cycle or other subsystem and therefore use battery. These could be for example any voip apps that can receive calls etc..

@ Magic: If it was a faulty phone, then I had the bad luck of all 3 replacements being faulty. Other than my wifi (which was actually worse on the older 3GS phones I had, but a little better now), I don't have any issues with my iP4. Battery life is back to how it was when I first started using an iPhone under 3.1.x. I did do the full charge and complete drain a number of times on the pervious phones. With no luck. Like I said, I spent months trying every single tip that I can find, and nothing helped (including updating to the latest iOS). It was only when Apple finally upgraded me to the iP4 that 95% of all issues I previously had disappeared. As you can guess, I'm reluctant to take the chance of updating and running the same issues I had with the 3GS after updating to 4.0. Unless I really have to, I'll stick with what is working for me. Sure, I can't use certain newer apps, or newer features. But weighing those against a working phone. I'll take a working phone. 🙂

I just really wished though that we could downgrade to the previous iOS were using (and not having issues or less of issues with). That way if we update, and things go screwy, we can always revert back to the version that was working better for us.

I think we're arguing the same point to a degree!

Anyway, I did find my battery lasts longer with the new update.... although it's only been over night, and the morning usage so far.

Which I think is just luck, it's within the normal battery usage fluctuations I have noticed.

Feel nice though, as it makes me dream it's an update that makes the phone better; rather then an update that fixed a small bug that was problematic for some people, but not a problem for me.

Which kind of makes me wonder about what I've though before. A newer, faster, more memory iPhone (ie. iP4) will use up less battery than the older 3GS. Possibly Apple's way of hinting to users of older iPhones to upgrade so that they don't have issues. Not saying that is, but it certainly is plausible. After upgrading to the iP4, I stopped having the issues I had with the 3GS. And I'm still using the same apps, even more now. I've also read in posts, that some people have started noticing lags on their iP4 after updating to 4.3.x. Maybe it's a coincidence, but the iP5 with iOS 5 is coming out this fall. Things that make you go hmmmmmm. lol

Yep, Apple definitely did improve the battery life in iP4 over 3GS, and in iPhone 5 it will be most likely be even better! I am happy tho with the current battery life on iP4 and will stick to it until it lasts..