iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I have said this before and will say it again. I cannot even get my phone to charge to 100%. it only gets to 98% no matter how long I leave it plugged in.

Ok after 4 hours in its standby "door stop" state the battery is on 99%. So I think that the problem lies with the data connectivity of the phone. Which means that the general OS can't be running a random service sucking power in the background.

From my observations of what has been going on over the last few days, I believe the problem lies with the 3G connectivity of the phone. As you can't turn off 3G independently from GPRS, EDGE and WiFi, there is no way of nailing it down precisely. However I restored my iPhone 4 from an iCloud backup of the iPhone 4s this morning. I noticed a greater battery drain than I had before I upgraded to an iPhone 4s on the iPhone 4. It was loosing about 4-5% per hour. Which was worse than ever before with the iPhone 4. Almost on par with the iPhone 4s. All I did was disable 3G in the network settings and now it has been sat at 79% for the last hour and a half.

I think that if Apple released a fix bringing back the ability to turn off 3G independently from other data connections, it would fix the problem as a temporary measure. At least until they get to the root of the problem.

Just discovered that you can have mobile data switched off in network settings and still use the WiFi connection. I feel another test coming...

Chris, this is meant constructively not argumentatively. I'm doubtful about the 3G/2G switch being the solution. My iP4 is on VZW and I don't believe it ever had that feature. My battery usage definitely went up after the iOS5 upgrade, though with some reasonable tweaks that don't seem to affect the phone's usefulness I'm back near where I was before. I have a brand-new iP4S sitting here, still shrink-wrapped, waiting for an activate-or-return decision depending on how this shakes out in the next week. My hunch is that this is a question of iOS5 and default settings rather than hardware, but that that's just a barely educated guess.

I have contributed to this discussion and even though I have set all my preferences to NO I am still getting emailed everytime somebody posts - can anyone help..?

Download something like Battery Magic.

Wait until your phone goes below 25%

Let it do a full recondition charge on the phone with top off.

It will go back up to 100%

I was at a meeting with someone who got a 4s and traded in her blackberry. So she had nothing to update from, no migration, it was a clean setup. She couldn't believe she had to recharge it mid-day (she's a physician who expects her phone to run 12+ hours). She did have her Exchange email and a number of shared calendars, so I showed her how to remove the less critical ones and change the interval for manual.

For every person on this forum or who has taken the time to go to a genius bar or call support, there has to a significant number of others who are experiencing it and are just frustrated and can't figure out what they are doing wrong. In her case she was just incredulous that it could be so poor and was too busy to do anything about it.

Just an update.

I unplugged my phone at 8:09AM. (took a screen shot to remember the exact time)

It's now 9:02AM, and after only 29 minutes of 'usage' I'm down 7%. All I did was check emails, go on Safari, and text messaged, and checked facebook (just looked didn't do anything else).

All my settings are as recommended by the Apple Support guy for battery test.

AT&T 64GB White: San Antonio, TX (With full HSPA+ coverage and 1 of the 3 AT&T test markets for LTE ... but obviously I can't take advantage of the LTE with the 4S)

It's not just related to ios 5. I am a dev. and have been running the Beta, now GM for months. On my older iPhone 4, I saw a definite drop in Battery Life on early Beta's; however, this was fixed over time and each new Beta provided me with better battery life. Before the GM was released, I saw virtually no difference between my iPhone 4 battery performance from iOS 4.3.3 and 5.0 Beta 7 (plus a few days on the GM; prior to moving over to the 4S) The slight drop in battery life can easily be attributed to the extra background tasks being implemented in the OS. Upon upgrading (?) to the 4S last Friday, I immediately noticed a DRAMATIC difference in battery life. I've seen a number of posts in this forum, along with posts in Apple-Centric Blogs which seem to indicate that this is not a universal problem and that many (if not most) of the new 4S owners not experiencing this problem. Regardless; with over 4 million phones sold in the opening weekend, it only takes a very small percentage of owners to provide a very large base of people having problems.

Regarding individuals who post that you should turn off 50% - 80% of the phones functions to "make it work"; that's just absurd. Thease are core functions / features of the phone and you should not have to turn any of them off in order to make the phone usable.

I drained my battery down to 3% last night (early) and let it charge fully to 100%. after 2 1/2 hours of being unplugged, I have made 2 phone calls (under 60 seconds each) and performed 3 brief SIRI inquiries. My battery level is now down to 83%.

on my iPhone 4 (under the various iOS 5 beta's) I would regularly put heavy usage on the device throughout the day. I'd listen to a combination of streaming music (MOG, iHeart Radio, TWIT, TII ...) and podcasts / Audiobooks / music which resided on my phone. I easily spent about an hour a day talking on the phone and used a vast array of apps; which I did not "Kill" after exiting. The only time I ever connected the dock connector was to upload test application code to the phone, or to charge overnight. I seldom had to worry about a low battery during the day; only needing to give a booster charge in the early evening, if I knew I would need it for a few more hours.

This is obviously not the case with my 4S. While Apple may eventually isolate the cause, I can't afford to wait and have made a Genius Bar appointment to see about getting a phone swap.

In the mean time, I have a suggestion for everyone on this forum. It won't fix anything, but it might help discern if there is anything in common with the phones that are experiencing this problem. Just as I have done at the top of this post. If everyone posting new messages will start with the model specifications (amount of RAM & black vs. white) along with your carrier and general location, it might (absolutely no guarantees) point out a commonality among those experiencing this problem. On the other hand, if there are no common threads (outside of the fact that they are all iPhone 4S devices) this is still useful information to collect and pass on to Apple for their own internal search for a cuase / fix. Just a suggestion.

I took my 4s into the Apple Store. Had to restore the phone to the orginal settings and install the phone as a new device. (Note: you will lose all text messages, camera roll and app specific information, etc.) Apparently, the stuff from the old phone runs along with the new stuff - burning up the battery. Forgive my non-techie explanation. So far so good on the battery life.

Fingers crossed, my battery life seems to be getting better.

I did turn off Push, and have toggled between email accounts (i.e., turned off work email while at work, leaving Yahoo on; then vice versa when I leave work), with the active email account set to manual 15 minutes. Turned off a lot of notifications and location services too.

But yesterday I drained to 4% (the 2nd time I've done so) and charged up to 100%, around 2:30 p.m. It's now 9:15 a.m. my time and the battery's still at 70%, despite a decent amount of email usage last night and this a.m., some Words With Friends, about 20 minutes of surfing on the train, and other usages.

So - maybe the battery needs to "age". Or maybe it was turning off a lot of the notifications and/or triaging my email accounts. And I wholeheartedly agree that I shouldn't have to do that latter - what's the point of a smartphone if I can't use it for integrated email accounts? - but that said, fingers crossed, things do seem to be getting better.

For what its worth I called Apple to see if there is any official position and there isn't, only suggestion was trying turning off Location Services. I reiterated to them that in my personal case I can narrow it down to precisely one thing that drains the battery - the presence of calendars for which I do OTA synching. Hopefully she passes that word along. I can replicate it quite easily. If I turn the calendar fetching to manual it helps, but not completely. Switching it from 15 minutes to 1 hour has very little effect. Delete the calendars and BAM, my phone seems like it will run forever.

AT&T 64GB White (shipped from China Tuesday 10/11): Rochester, NY

I too wanted to just add I'm having this drain as well. I refuse to turn off all the things or waste time trouble shooting this device with a restore, etc...I think we all agree it should work as advertised. I did submit a report via the online link someone posted earlier. I'm just concerned that Apple doesn't yet seem to be accepting this as a serious issue. I've ran mine down to 0 last night and it shut off. I got it back to 75% before I needed to unplug and leave the house. I did charge over night and it was stuck on 98% but I pluged back in and got it to 100% at 7am. For me 5 hours later with moderate use, I'm at 25% now. That is just crazy and I was seeing better battery from my 5 year old original iPhone that I upgraded from!!

For the people calling Apple, are you keeping the case open for follow up? Do you get the sense that Apple is taking this as a serious issue and when would they provide a real fix? I feel like the stores and the Genius bar are typically little help and never feeds back to mother Apple for issues like this. I was also told the people that work there don't get trained and have to self learn. Often we as customers teach them things. So it is hit or miss on talent. Notice CNN just posted this article and battery is the #2 issue: http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/19/tech/mobile/iphone-4s-problems/index.html?hpt=hp_c 2

As JonGoldman has said above, I too have narrowed my battery drain precisely to my calendars in my email account settings. If I shut off my calendars, I can leave everything else running as normal and my battery life is fine. I will post today an update from doing a complete reset on my phone last night, but I just wanted to pop back in and agree with Jon.

I also noticed my phone was not ridiculously hot when I took it off the charger this morning...

I added back in my 2 x iCloud accounts and 1 x Exchange account. I set fetch data to 30 minutes. Switched WiFi on. Location services off, Siri off and set iCloud Documents & Data to off as well as Photostream off. The iPhone 4s dropped 1% in 90 minutes, which is more like it. I have 9 calendars to sync 1 on exchange, 8 on two separate iCloud accounts.

Mobile data is still switched off, there is also no SIM card inserted.

I'm going to switch services back on every hour and see what drains the quickest.