rapid battery drain after upgrading to iOS 5

Dave,

Did you reboot the phone before readding the accounts? I ask because when I deleted my exchange and icloud mail accounts, I readded the exchange account and all of my customized previous settings were restored. For example, signature, 6 months of calendar sync, keep 1000 messages, etc. were all back to where I customized my exchange settings prior to deleting that account.

Scott

I sure did - all of those settings should be server-side, not device-side.

Dave, thanks for the quick reply. I will remove, reboot, and re-add just in case!

Scott

Either way, it will be like butter!

Just an update on my issue. As I stated earlier, I believe that the issue with my particular battery drain problem is limited to the calendar for my work Exchange account. This said, I re-added the account, and left everything enabled but the calendar synchronization. Roughly, 2% of drain per hour...much better than the 5% per half hour.

When I enabled the calendar synchronization, the drain again wen up. So, to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, I turned off the calendar synchronization again. I then cleared EVERY entry from my calendar, so that it was completely blank. (I'm in a new role, so it wasn't as full as it would normally be.) I then re-enabled the calendar synchronization again. And, again, the battery drain problem came back. (Again, this is with a completely blank calendar.)

This said, it ruled out my hypothesis that maybe I had an errant calendar entry that was choking the iPhone's Exchange connector. It does indicate that there is some sort of problem the Exchange connector is having with my company's Exchange implementation. Though, I have to say, I have no problems with any other handset using the same configuration---inclusive of the iPhone 4 that was replaced by the iPhone 4s. (Both running iOS 5.)

I have a couple of days to mull over whether or not I should just go back to my iPhone 4, and return the iPhone 4s until Apple acknowledges/fixes issues with Exchange synchronization. I've seen enough of a sample set in the Apple support site to believe it's not just me, and is likely indicative of a larger issue.

This said, I believe this thread has shown there are MANY things that are affecting battery utilization with iOS 5. Although we've all tried to narrow the cause, Apple is likely the only one that can find the common theme between them all. (At a more micro level.) The fact that I have an iPhone 4 that works perfectly, and is a mirror of the 4s (sans iOS differences for processor, camera, etc.), leads me to believe that they're going to have a tough time nailing down root cause...if they're even trying.

Joel

Dave,

I did this yesterday morning (deleted and re-setup my migrated exchange account). For the past 36 hours, it has made a huge improvement in the battery life.

I came across an interesting flaw with the iOS 5 that is causing a severe battery drain. I have noticed that when the phone has no data signal the battery starts to drain extremely quickly. In two occasions I found myself in an area with no data signal coverage (AT&T iphone 4S) and noticed the phone getting warmer and severe battery drain while on standby (about 15%+ per hour on standby). I even try closing all apps but that did not alleviate the problem. When I left that area that had no data coverage everything went back to normal.

One thing to note: My phone had a 3G signal but the data signal was not available because of a nearby antenna issue (I was able to verify with AT&T).

Second experiment was conducted at home with my Wifi turned on but my modem off. This way the phone stayed linked to my Wifi network but could not go online because my modem was turned off.

Upon trying this out, I noticed the same 15%+ drain on my iphone. When I turned the modem back on the problem went away.

I would think apple should monitor actual data signal or lack of data activity and do some king of background deactivation of the apps that are persistent in acquiring that data. Probably just periodically checking if that signal it’s actually available and enabling everything back.

Something needs to be done about this. First of all the abnormal abuse of the battery by this iOS can’t be good for the life expectancy of it and having to scramble for a place to charge the phone every few hours is extremely frustrating.

What I have noticed is in the notifications screen, I will have calendar events which will continually flip in and out of notification screen. Basically two calendar events overall lay the same entry. Once I disabled the calendar notifications my battery has returned to normal. I have seen it on different calendar events so no single poision pill.

Forgot to mention, 3GS with exchange email

Have you tried deleting your exchange account in Utilities, rebooting, and then resetting up the exchange account? That did the trick for me. I was getting down to 25% of battery by noon. Now I have 70% at end of day.

There has been some discussion in one of these threads about locations services and GPS draining the battery. I just noticed the GPS symbol active at the top of my screen but when I went to the location services page, no applicatin was currently using it and only the Camera showed it had been used within 24 hours (I used the camera last evening).

The location services symbol didn't stop until I shut off all location services. I am wondering if there is an application that randomly uses GPS and is draining the batteries in addition to other programs?

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!!!!

turn off SETTING TIME ZONE!!!

in settings > location services > scroll to bottom to system services > turn off setting time zone

At 7am i unplugged with 100% charge, usually with regular use of phone, facebook, internet, texting, email, photos, etc I have to plug in to recharge by 2pm bc it will be down to 12-15%, it is now 4:51pm and I am still at 68% with normal usage today!!! This solved my problem, hope it solves your as well!

I was able to solve this problem without any tradeoffs. A Genius Bar rep explained to me today how to do a "firmware level restore" after that no proglems so far. hope this helps.

I have turned off auto mode for date and time setting - i.e. I must set the date and time on my phone manually.

I have turned this off on the 22nd of October and I have not had the problems since

IOS 5 is slower than IOS 4 but my battery is no longer draining quickly.

This is the only change I have made - I didn't make any changes to email account and all is now working as expected.

Hello everyone,

I was having similar issues with my iPhone 4S battery life, although it wasn't an everday occurance. Somedays it would drain 1% every few minutes and other days it was fine. It seemed like there was some sort of process running in the background that would drain the battery when the phone was in Standby.

Luckily, I was able to solve my particular issue and it solved the battery life issue for me. It had to do with a calendar event running in the background. Please check these two threads and see if this fixes your issue. Hopefully this will help some of you out. A quick way to check is to look at your pull down notifcations and see if the calendar looks "jittery" at all. Also, unanswered calendar invites caused a problem for me as well...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3407203?answerId=16452965022#16452965022

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3380426?answerId=16456738022#16456738022

- JR -