Q: IOS-5 battery power drain issue

since i deactivate iCloud, my battery go normal.

i also found that turning off iCloud was a major factor in extending battery life, i only turn it on when i add stuff that i need to back-up, i don't need it running constantly.

Also when you go into iCloud, manage storage, and look at all the data from each App thats being baked-up, you have the option to turn Apps off or on.

The main issue is that the Location Services icon isn’t enabled so you do not know when the iPhone is using the GPS.

First of all, turn it on:

Settings > Location Services > System Services > Status Bar Icon

Now you can tweak other System Services also. I have disabled the following ones:

• Compass Calibration
• Diagnostics
• Location-Based iAds
• Time Zone

I also disabled Location Services for the following apps:

• Reminder
• Weather

These 2 tend to enable the GPS all the time, which I figured out once I had the Icon back up.

My iPhone 4 now has the same battery life as it had before.

Hope this helps!

Settings > Brightness > turn OFF Auto-Brightness and manually set brightness at half-way point.

This resolved the battery drain issue on my iPhone 3GS.

HayriC wrote:

 

Here we go. The solution is below. Hope it will work for you too!

 

1- Delete your email account(s) in Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Your Account > Delete Account

2- Reset Network Settings in Settings > Reset > Reset Network Settings

3- Reboot your phone by holding the sleep/wake (top) button then sliding to off.

4- Re-add the email account Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account…

5- Turn push back on

This worked for me. Prior to doing this was going from 100% to 0% in less than 15 hours without using the phone. Now I am back to normal use, phone has gone from 100% to 99% in 30 mintes much more normal. A lot of the people saying they've tried everything don't actually list removing the email account from the trouble shooting. Clearly the new OS is struggling with the old email connections so try this please.

Solution:

1. Turn off iPhone.

Yes, yes. I did it all too. And it all HELPS...

But -- what helped the MOST - CALIBRATE your battery. Drain it to 0 and them fully charge it.

Everything posted here and that made a significantly noticeable difference. Battery life on 4s is still not great but much better.

Of course my above post is for new 4s owners, not 4 or 3GS owners. So not upgraders. Sorry for any confusion that may have caused

I fell in the same boat -- iPhone4 would drain literally 50% in one evening.  I read each and every post here and tried various remedies.  None returned my phone to the original pre-IOS5 battery life except cold botting the phone.  I recommend you do the same -- I have all the details here:

http://michael.olivero.com/post/2011/10/20/iOS5-battery-issue-with-iPhone4.aspx

I even jogged for 20 minutes with GPS tracking me and streaming pod casts + a few hours of rest time only draining a small percentage.  I definitely have pre-iOS5 battery life again!  You don't have to sacrifice all the new features to get the same batery life -- I surely didn't want to turn off iCoud although I would if I had to.

Cold booting did not solve the issue on 3GS for me. I even did a full restore and resync from a backup via itunes.

Only after removing mail accounts, resetting network settings, restarting phone, then re-adding mail accounts restored acceptable battery life.

Another thing I forgot to mention and became coincidentally obvious to me was wireless-n vs. wireless-g. Prior to the ios5 update, I bought a new wireless-n router and configuring it as an access point to my existing router. When connection to the N-wireless the battery would drain visibly faster ( I would guess 20-30% faster ) and I j my came to realize that because I was still able to switch it back to be G-wireless to confirm. So now doing great on ios5 battery and even better while connected to the G.

I'm goin to start activating additional iCloud  features and will post if I find something which triggers the fast discharge.

I started day with 90% jogged in afternoon with gla tracking and podcast streaming plus misc emails in evening. I'm writing this post via iPhone safari past midnight and I still have 54% showing so don't give up on fixing the battery issue.

A few comments and finding from me so far:

In a sense I have been in a position where it has been easy for me to try to track down the issue as ever since ios5 on my iphone 4 my usage time has equalled my standby time (In Genreal, Usage, at the bottom). Thus the battery would drain within 5 hours say (totally). So i knew the phone was constantly active doing something. So turning things off and checking the difference between usage and idle time would show me what it was that was running.

Yesterday I turned off iMessage and for about an hour that did the trick. Standby time ticked along while usage remained stationary. Horray, issue found! Well, no as when I got home about an hour later the usage started to move along again at a 1 for 1 rate with standby.

Then I read the above re removing email accounts and again for a while that seemed to do the trick. I had 25% battery left when going to bed but unfortunately my phone was off and dead this morning when i woke up and an inspection of the usage time again shows that it spent most of its time being 'used' whilst on standby over night.

So for me so far it seems some of the suggestions here solve the issue they seem to only temporarily solve the issue. I'm just fully charging it again now and will do some more testing today. But it seems to be a process that my phone gets in to doing constantly in the back ground. I guess that could be related to my icloud account where it gets stuck in a loop sync'ing something (mail / contacts etc) and that might be account related (on the server) which is why this is not an issue everyone has. But so far I think its a fix Apple need to come up with. But I'll keep searching and trying.

Before my battery would last the day but now its dead by around 2pm. I have a screen shot of my battery on 2% with Usage at about 4.5 hours and Standby or 4.5 hours. ie I tookit off charge and for the following 4.5 hours it constantly did something even though 4 of them it would have been in standby mode, and then died 4.5 hours later! I think some people are on here saying my battery is worse and are relating to differences of 10-20% and that turning x,y and z off helps this but there is a bigger issue going on here for some of phones dying in 5 hours.

I have a iphone 4, and the battery draining issues.  I went through the steps others have posted and the problem seems to be fixed.  Yesterday i had an average usage day and the battery when I got home was at 70%.  This is normal for me.  I might try turning a few things back on to see what happens.  but so far so good.  good luck

Went to sleep with 53% and woke up with 49%. I turned on bookmark sync last night. I now have contacts, bookmarks, find my iPhone, photo stream, & documents in the cloud on.  It should last me the day.  I'll turn another feature on tonight.

After tried and error numerious times, it comes down to deleting all email settings except iCloud fixed my problem.  I now have most of the notification, iCloud settings set to on and the battery is draining normally.  To remedy the email problem, I just forward all email to my iCloud account for now.