rapid battery drain after upgrading to iOS 5

Since buying my 4S, I was amazed at the rate of battery drain. I was losing 20% of the charge in an hour with light usage. No usage at all and I lost 10% in an hour. I looked online, trying turning most postential sources of drain off (location service, blue tooth, wifi, time zone, turn off Push on email, notifications etc. -- all items noted in online forums). None of this had any effect at all.

Then I saw a post in another forum which recommended going to Network and "Reset Network Settings". I tried this but no difference.

The I saw a post which recommended "Reset All Settings" and then turn off time zone. I've turned off time zone, notications, push email, blue tooth and wifi afterwards -- again). Note that Siri and iCloiud are also off at the moment.

This time however, ,y phone only lost 1% of its charge in 2 hours of non-use. I don't know if the 'fix' will hold or not since I've seen many posts mentioning recurrent problems. But this was the first and ONLY fix that seemed to get me to a 'normal' state. My definition of normal is comparison to OS5 on my regular iphone 4.

Once I see if this is stable (has been stable for about 8 hoyurs so far), I will try turning on the other services one by one and see what effect it has, if any on the battery. I'll update.

The reset did it for me, I left the all else unchanged. Back to normal sofar.

yes, so far SUCCESS but I don't want to be too optimistic yet.

I should note that when I said I was comparing to battery ddrain with OS5 on my iphone 4, I did NOT experience this problem on the iphone 4 with OS 5, ONLY with the 4S. Just to be clear.

I guess for diagnostic purposes, I should mention that I did not use a restore to install my OS 5 from a previous backup. I plugged it into my itunes and did a data synch. So some data came from the itunes and some came from mobilme account.

Good luck and I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

My 4S was draining the battery VERY rapidly from the beginning. I could almost see it going down by the minute. I mean like 20% drain in an hour. My original installation was not via restore but by itunes sync.

I turned many of the potential culprits off to try and deal with the problem after reading many online forums. NONE of them had any effect at all.

Then I found one recommendation to RESET ALL SETTINGS (not just network settings).

After that I turned many of the settings to off (such as location services, time zone support, wifi, bluetooth, reduced Exchange to email only). The effect was immediate.

Gradually I've been turning some o fht esettings back on abnd monitoring the effect (e.g., wifi). That was 10 hours ago and my phone has been reacting normally in terms of functioning and battery drain. Quite comparable with OS5 on my iphone 4 on which battery drain was not outside of expected boundaries.

I am having the same battery issues and my Store settings were already off!

It is happing with iPads updated to iOS 5 also. Up to 20% per hour if you are using it.

I just upgraded to iOS 5.0.1 and my iPhone 4 is draining the batteryFASTER than iOS 5.0

What kind of crapy updates are releasing Apple to it's products. We do need some one like Jobs to get things working as spected inside Apple.

I will sell this uselessgadget.

Best Regards,

Oscar A. Mata T.

iPhone 4 with iOS 5.0.1 from Movistar in Venezuela

Have you turned back the fetch settings for your email accounts and turned off location services?

Dear All

this is a an updated response to my earlier contributions. Don't know if it's helping anyone but....

I earlier noted that after purchase of iphone 4s with OS 5.0, I was getting a 20% drain per hour. I tried many of the suggestions of turning off time, push etc.

The ONLY fix that had a major impact was to RESET ALL SETTINGS. I tried almost every other suggested step or fix but THIS ONE FIX had the desired impact.

Last nite I monitiored battery drain with my phone while I spet and the phone unplugged to any power source. At 12:00 am, I had 69% battery. Seven hours later, I had 51% or a 2.5% drain per hour. I consider that acceptable even if it's not great. And it is a HUGE difference from my initial experience.

Additional info: I am using location services on but with time zone off, fetch on and push off.

Hope this helps someone else. I was ready to go back to my iphone 4 before fixing this problem. Now I am satisfied if not enthusiastic about the current capability of 4s with OS 5.0

I just configured it LIKE my iOS 4.3.5 configuration, the battery life MUST BE THE SAME. So iOS 5 is crap. I´m going tomorrow to Movistar to complain for this poor piece of tech.

Best regards,

Oscar.

After 5.0.1 is the same or worse...

I haven't seen any improvement either. That said, I fixed the major draw I had a couple of weeks ago. (Documented here earlier.) But, it is still doing 2-3% an hour generally--but does sometimes drop more significantly without reason. (As it did yesterday, post update.)

Joel

Just chiming in to say that I'm noticing drastic battery drain on my iPhone 4S after the newest update. Nothing noticebale on the iPad.

I'm new to this forum and to an extent as well to Apple. However I've beeen a cell phone user for 30+ years and have advanced with technology at a steady and constant pace. I switched to Apple from Blackberry after extended consideration and after a few phones were on the market. Plus I wanted to be sure that the benefits were worthwhile.

I have an iPhone 4 which until recently has only caused me minimal frustrations, ie freezing issues, s/w bugs, performance, the usual. All this was bearable until I upgraded to iOS5. I truly regret this decision and want nothing more than to go back to what I had.

Since iOS5, my phone/battery usage time has diminished by over 50%. To add insult to injury, I receive a text message 6 days into my plan month to be advised that I've used 5.5G of data of my 6G data plan. The worst part, I'm on WiFi 80% of each day if not more. What the heck is going on? In 18 months I've not so much as reached 1G of usage. I upgrade to iOS5 and do the same thing I've been doing for 18 months and the only support answers I get are turn this off, turn that off, don't use this, don't use that.

No one seems to have the answer. I've been using WiFi 80% of the time both at home and at work and now for some reason I shouldn't use it because it uses more battery, yet I can't turn it off because I have no data left! Apple and Rogers support is always the same and such an ordeal. Backup your phone, restore factory settings, test it a few days, restore your information and if you still have a problem, call us. What a waste of time and a croc of you know what.

I've been in technology for 25+ years, I may not be an Apple specialist, thank God because someone would get an ear full but I'm not an idiot when it comes to technology or mobility. All these support teams know how to do is read from script, they can't think out of the box and no one has a flipping clue what the **** is going on otherwise they would resolve this problem.

So my take on this situation is go back to iOS4 or scrap Apple altogether till they figure out how to fix what they broke. Any recommendations?

Hi Kathleen,

I've managed to follow a couple of tips offfered on the internet and so it seems that my battery life has been stable. I've noticed I haven't been losing drastic battery life as I mentioned above in my posting. However, I have noticed that if I'm texting heavily, it will drain the battery, otherwise I'm okay.