iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I have exactly the same... called apple. They said it was abnormal. Sended me a new one straight away!

So don't sit and wait. Pick up the phone! 🙂

I had the same problem like everyone else losing about 10% per hour, I restored the 4s and than I went into Location services - system services and turned off traffic,setting time zone, location based iAds and Diagnostic & Usage.

That seemed to have done the trick it is using less than 1% per hour at the moment!

I see many people saying they have the same problem, but noone from Apple telling us how to fix it!!!!!!! Apple, your responsibilities with your customers don't stop after they have paid you!!!

My 4s is draining faster than the 3GS after 30 months of use! That's unacceptable and want (a) someone to tell me how to fix it OR (b) Tell me that someone is looking into it. Do I need to go to a store and change the phone? Are some 4s deffective? I don't mind either. I just want to know what I should be doing. Saying this my 4s has twice frozen during charging needing a deep reboot to bring it back to life. Is this normal as well?

To the ones looking for answers I can tell you that there isn't just one problem. I have set up my 4s not to send emails to Apple, iCloud off, Siri off and notifications minimal. And it's still draining.

A possible solution, and a suggestion for people reading this thread...

First off, if you are only going to say "me too" please don't post. If you say "me too, and I tried this and it didn't work" that is fine, but just "me too" doesn't add anything and only burries possible solutions for people so they can't find pertinent posts. Don't pollute this thread!!

My solution that 100% cured the problem...

I was having extreme battery drain issues so I did the "Reset all settings" trick that has been suggested. It did work in giving me back some of my battery life, but it still fell way short of apple's spec. I would get about 30 - 40 hours of standby time.

I then decided to go crazy,

1. On my computer I removed the itunes folder from my music folder, I also removed the itunes folder from my library folder and finally removed anything that said ipod or itunes from my preferences folder. I then restarted my computer. This took iTunes back to a fresh state like it is when first installed (I don't know if this was necessary but it is what I did).

2. I then turned off my phone and plugged it into my computer while holding the home button down to start the phone in recovery mode. From there I restored my phone (that is the only option in recovery mode).

3. When the phone started back up I set it up as a new phone. I just left all of the settings on the phone as default. I even activated iCloud.

4. I then went to the itunes store and went to the "Purchased" section to re-download all of my apps. Once those downloaded I synced my phone again.

Doing this completely solved my battery drain. I am now getting battery life that is as advertised by apple and also beats what I was getting on my 3GS!

I have not enabled:

Twitter integration

Location services for weather

Photostream

iCloud backup

Wireless Sync

Everything else is on.

I will be enabling the services listed above one at a time to make sure nothing breaks the phone again. In the meantime though my phone is now working perfectly.

I have no idea what fixed my problem or what might break it again (if it does happen again). All I know is it works now. If you are brave enough to start with a fresh iTunes library please post back your results. Just remember to back up your existing library first so you don't end up losing your music. Also make sure to sync your photo's from your phone so you don't lose any pictures before you do the restore.

Fixed ta---da......

@spiritflair, have you tried the following (with screen shots)? I'm still at 75% after about 1 1/2 days after doing the following, and the fix only takes about 5 minutes:

https://plus.google.com/u/0/109087467436585685463/posts/Zukh8dFh7Ao

I'd be interested to hear if you and others are able to get the improvements I've gotten.

spiritflare wrote:

Been using the 4S for 2 weeks now - I have noticed that I am losing 1% of power every 5 mins with:

- brightness turned to minimum (i am reading in bed)

- No network connectivity (WiFi off, BT off, 3G off)

- All data streams set to Fetch, not PUSH

- All apps capable of Push, such as Facebook, set push to OFF

No apps running. checked with System Activity Monitor (Free from App Store) - checked all services running - there is nothing "rogue" running in terms of services, no idle processes, CPU is mostly idle or less than 5%, and yet i am draining, draining.

Wondering if it could be the power consumption of the new antenna? I am the radio is always on unless you go to airplane mode. In any case, your guess is as good as anyone's.

My 4S battery life has 'improved' somewhat after disabling all relevant location services, system services, notifications, ping, 3G, exchange push, contacts, calendars, iCloud acct, and Siri raise to speak. I performed a fresh install with no restore to date. AIso, I have conditioned that battery twice and reset the network settings. WiFi, Yahoo push, and local weather app notification are enabled.

My best usage stats so far are: 6 hrs of usage and 34 hrs of standby - still nowhere near the advertised battery and power specifications for this phone. Underwhelming, indeed.

It appears that iTunes Wi-Fi Sync may also be contributing to iOS5, 4, 4S battery related issues.

Today in iTunes (Windows 7, x64) I found that my device was 'connected' even though my 4S was NOT connected to power. My PC was started up this a.m. after my phone had been disconnected from my charger overnight. I have since disabled wireless sync in iTunes to further mitigate battery drain...

Message was edited by: mgerrard

you wanna share your stats please?

I had started off with pretty bad batetry life: The phone overheating and dropping upto 25% in an hour while idling. I downloaded an app called "System Activity Monitor", and saw that the CPU was running at over 80% most of the time. Typically, killing all apps and restarting the phone fixed this cpu jump, but there were times it did not fix the issue. This led me to believe that ot was probably something to do with a system process. Read on an another forum that disabling location services for timezone and disabling the calendar in the notification center helped. Did that, and i have much better battery life. I can get by the whole day without recharging, provided i start of with 100% in the morning. I stream a couple hours of music, a few calls and texts. Location services are on for some apps (not for reminders though). iCloud is on for photostream contacts and reminders, but not for syncing. 2 mail accounts set up to fetch every half hour.

I started with 100% on saturday evening and went to 20% by sunday evening, which included a few phone calls, some browsing, an hour long skype video call. I guess it might still be a bit under spec, but it definitely works for me.

Also, I set it up as a new phone and calibrated the battery twice.

My battery just about lasts for one (working) day, but I can see it draining even if I don't use it.

Done the "reset all settings" and disable setting time zones, but so far I cannot see an improvement.

I installed Console to look at the console log as some people suggested but don't really know what to do with that information now.

One thing I notice looking at the log is that AppleBCMWLANJOINManager seems to come up a lot when the phone is sitting on my desk and connected to a wifi network.

Not too sure if that could help explaining the battery drainage?

Hello from Germany!

I'm a new Iphone 4s user. Didn't use any Apple products before. But surely compared to my previous Samsung smartphone the speed by which the battery is draining here is astonishing. I spoke both with Apple(Germany) support as well as with my provider's (o2) hotline. Both didn't have an instant solution but were aware of a problem.

My question is: both parties have suggested a RESTORE AS A NEW PHONE as the only solution at this point. Have any of you already tried that option? Is it worth of investing a time in it, was it helpful? Or should we just wait for the official Apple statement on this issue? Many thanks.

I have returned to give more feedback about the 4S battery issue. I received my phone on launch day, as I mentioned earlier. The battery was terrible to start. I proceeded to do several power cycles and I saw improvements. It was not enough though. I have an iPhone 4 as well and I was comparing battery life to that. The iPhone 4 had already had a year of battery training so I was giving the new 4S the benefit of the doubt. After taking several suggestions from this thread I saw some very drastic improvements. Specifically after 1) wiping the phone and starting fresh and restoring from iCloud backup 2) Turning of Auto Time Zone 3) Turning off diagnostic feature to send data to Apple 4) Turning off Contacts and Calendars from the iCloud features (I left mail, bookmarks, notes, photo stream, docs and data, find my iphone on). I also have had SIRI, Notifications, Location Services on the whole time. Email is set to Fetch every 15 minutes with 4 email accounts. Now you have all my settings. During my last test, which ended on Saturday, I had gone 2 days 21 hours standby time with Usage being at around 6 hours. I had gotten the exact same usage and standby for both my 4 and 4S. I had decided that my battery life issues were resolved since this was at least what I was getting before the 4S. Then the unusual occurence. I went to bed yesterday and both my phones were around 70%. Woke up, 4S was dead, 4 was at 10%. Strangely, my wife's 3GS was also almost dead (unusual for her). Was Apple or ATT doing some kind of download/upload last night? Anyway. Very out of the blue. Didn't expect it. We'll see what happens today.

I think Your Dad (and a couple of others) may be onto something by pointing that there may be two problems here. I've implemented some of the suggested fixes, and this helped my phone standby a lot. However, went to town today on the train (mostly overground, underground 30 minutes tops) over about 3 hours today. Took fully charged phone and listened to Music for say, 1.5hrs. Watched 30minutes of a video. Browsed the net and used Reeder for about 30 minutes. This used up 50% of the battery.

I will try in a day or two restoring back to my old iPhone 4, and use that for a couple of days to see the difference.

Hopefully this gives someone a good idea how to solve these issues.

Model: iPhone 4S, 16 GB

Carrier: Spring

I have a few posts within this thread detailing my own experiences with battery problems and how I managed to fix them. This weekend, my phone started acting up again. After I finally was able to get my battery to behave normally, I was getting close-to-specs standby usage -- fully charged phone at midnight unplugged and left unplugged until 8am this past Saturday morning and I saw 98% still left on my battery. Pretty good, right?

Then this morning, after I unplug my phone around 7am (100%) and then finished getting ready for work (around 7:30am), I notice a drop of 4% in the battery -- from 100% to 96% in 30 minutes. I check the Usage stats: both standy and usage times were listed as 30 minutes. Apparently my phone was doing _something_ for the whole 30 minutes... what it was, I have no idea. I check my Diagnostics and Usage page to see that a new entry: Preferences_2011-10-30... Apparently the Preferences process crashed overnight around 11:43pm (why, I don't know as I clearly was not using my phone at that time -- my wife and went to bed before then, and the phone was charging at that point). I've never seen such a crash prior to this weekend.

The resulting effect was that my phone was never actually entering Standby mode (usage and standby times were always equal, whereas before I would see stats like 22 hours of standby and only 3 hours of usage). Despite powwering my phone off and then back on several times, removing apps from the apps tray, and disabling all network features (notifications, push changed to fetch manually, disabling carrier data, etc -- wifi was turned on, but nothing that actually used any sort of network connection was enabled), my battery was draining before my very eyes. This left me suspecting something got corrupted with the network settings. I did reset on my network settings as was suggested by sever posts, and this seems to have restored my phone back to normal. I am back to having a normal battery even with push enabled, all my location options re-enabled, siri enabled, etc.

I know that many users, including myself, have suggested all sorts of options to enable/disable various features. However, I am beggining to think that it all boils down to one single culprit: at some point, your network settings will get clobbered. Maybe it is due to some buggy push code, maybe it's a bug in iOS, maybe it's a bug in the exchange servers, etc. Battery drain is most likely due to your iPhone continually using the network for some reason. Resetting my network settings provided a fix, though I suspect that it is only a temporary fix and I'll have to redo it again in the enar future.

Since the iPhone tries to do a lot of things for us "automagically" it seems only inevitable that battery drains are the direct result of an automatic configuration scheme going awry. And most of these automatic configurations are network related. It would certainly be nice if the next iOS update gives users more options in this regard -- give us an option to NOT have everything get set up automatically. At least give us the option to opt-out.

noah81 wrote:

I have returned to give more feedback about the 4S battery issue. I received my phone on launch day, as I mentioned earlier. The battery was terrible to start. I proceeded to do several power cycles and I saw improvements. It was not enough though. I have an iPhone 4 as well and I was comparing battery life to that. The iPhone 4 had already had a year of battery training so I was giving the new 4S the benefit of the doubt. After taking several suggestions from this thread I saw some very drastic improvements. Specifically after 1) wiping the phone and starting fresh and restoring from iCloud backup 2) Turning of Auto Time Zone 3) Turning off diagnostic feature to send data to Apple 4) Turning off Contacts and Calendars from the iCloud features (I left mail, bookmarks, notes, photo stream, docs and data, find my iphone on). I also have had SIRI, Notifications, Location Services on the whole time. Email is set to Fetch every 15 minutes with 4 email accounts. Now you have all my settings. During my last test, which ended on Saturday, I had gone 2 days 21 hours standby time with Usage being at around 6 hours. I had gotten the exact same usage and standby for both my 4 and 4S. I had decided that my battery life issues were resolved since this was at least what I was getting before the 4S. Then the unusual occurence. I went to bed yesterday and both my phones were around 70%. Woke up, 4S was dead, 4 was at 10%. Strangely, my wife's 3GS was also almost dead (unusual for her). Was Apple or ATT doing some kind of download/upload last night? Anyway. Very out of the blue. Didn't expect it. We'll see what happens today.

Interestingly, I had the exact same experience. I did a network reset, and that seemed to fix my problems. Try the same. I expect we'll be doing a lot more of these in the near future.