iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I talked with an Apple technician yesterday. They think that it could be a bad batch of phones (the same happened a few years ago with Blackberry). My friend has the same as mine (32GB) and it is not having any problems with the battery. I am going to the store today to test the battery. I am also having problems making and receiving calls.

I was also surprised to see that the actual capability of the 32 GB is 28GB (are you kidding me?????).

It is definitely worth calibrating/conditioning your battery multiple times by running it until the screen goes completely black and then recharging it to 100%. The full drawdown (and not just draining the battery to the 20% level) makes a big difference.

My 32Gb black 4s ran to 20% in two hours on the first day. So I calibrated the battery once by drawing it down to screenblack and began shutting things off and disabling/re-enabling/resetting services just as everyone in this thread has done and the battery life improved to 4 hours of use and 25 hours of standby which is still not close enough to spec for me.

So I calibrated again, and, in the process of draining the battery, manage to watch more than 45 minutes of a 720p movie with the battery indicator at 1% which suggests that the phone hasn't yet figured out what a normal current drawdown looks like. After two full calibrations, I'm not done drawing the battery down yet, but it appears initially that it will last significantly longer than the last battery cycle

Thing is, faulty battery calibration could result from either an iOS5 bug or a hardware bug or a random synergy between the two and it would also explain why not every new phone is affected as well as why not every upgraded iPhone 4 is affected. It also has explained why random battery drain has appeared as a bug for a significant number of users of past upgrade cycles.

The OS itself is using up some of your storage capacity so you'll never have the entire space (16g or 32g) available to you. That's fairly normal.

I'm interested to see what the store has to say when you go though. Post back after your visit. I'm not entirely pleased with my batt life either but if I'm not mistaken, I went through a similar thing with the newly released iP4. It needed a few iOS updates to get the batt life to stabilize.

4S folks, The battery issue I had initially is gone & I have started to reap the benefits of my patience & 2 simple things I tried based on the suggestion from the APPLE tech support.

1. Charge 100% & then drain it to 0% , let the phone go blank completely. To speeden this draining process you can use one of those free flash light apps & light it up.

2. Back-up on iTunes on your computer just for data safety & then back it up on iCloud as well. Then "erase your iPhone" from your setting menu & reset it to factory default. Then turn it ON & re-activate & then restore from the iCLOUD back-up first. You can later restore your music & apps from your computer.

This did it for me. Now I am seeing a really good satisfactory battery life. I dont have the overheating issue either.

The culprit is perhaps in the restore process from your previous phones.So try iCloud & then your local iTunes backup & for sure dont forget the first point, CHARGE - DRAIN - CHARGE

Enjoy your phone....

I will join the party...

I charged my 4S last night to 100%, took it off charge at 1:45am, by 7:10am, it was totally drained. My alarm did not go off which was set before going to sleep.

I can only assume this is to do with the iCloud sync as was connected to the Wifi. I have just disabled fully charged my phone to 100% again. Just about to take it off charge and see how it goes.

I hope something gets sorted pretty quick!!!

Just chiming in as another iPhone 4S user that is getting terrible battery life. My iPhone 3GS that I was using for 22 months was still exhibiting much better battery life then my 4S up till the day I made the switch. The funny thing is, the battery life seemed to be fine on the first full day of use and then it has just got down hill from there. I've done a complete drain and recharge once. Guess I'll do it some more and maybe restore to factory settings and just set my phone up as a new device. It's definitely frustrating to have to deal with this. I'm the goto Apple guy in my family and at work for others that have Mac or iOS related questions and don't know as much as I do about Apple products. I hope Apple can figure out a fix or iron out some quality control issues soon so that as some of these less experienced users start migrating to the 4S they aren't plagued with the same issues. I can tell you now, they are going to be a much more frustrated group of users than I am.

KP137.. Welcome & read my thread above.. I have this resolved now on mine & am seeing huge improvements.

Found out what was doing it for me. First of make sure you have done a full charge (e.g. Drain till 0% then charge till 100% and leave it to tricky charge for a little while.) then goto location services then system services and turn off setting time zone and traffic. Also make it so it shows the GPS indicator for these services. For me it was trying to find my location 24/7 for the clock and traffic. Also Im not sure what diagnostics was doing on seeing a I opted out of it at setup but yeh remember to turn that off if you don't want to be tracked.

Also please reply to tell me of this works for you and any other soloutions you have come across ;)

Syther101

I read through a few pages and can't believe how many people are having issues with this. I had a 3GS that worked fine....no problems whatsoever....until...I updated it. Apps quitting, battery drainage is unbelievable.

I was due for a new phone....my last 2 were used and given to me free and the one before that was a razor. I hadn't had a new phone for 6 years. So I thought I would get the 4s. Starting to feel as though it might have been a mistake.

Battery drainage is worse on the 4s then it was on the 3GS. Of course Apple suggests restoring....why should I have to restore a phone that is only 24 hours old? I'm pretty sure it is because of the update and an app I have....but which one?

Any ideas on how to figure that out? This thread has more complaints then solutions....

Thanks in advance for any help

Also in addition to my previous post, location based iAds aren't really needed ether

Im just gonna try a full restore on it, since that is the only thing I havent tried yet. i have seem multiple thread/instances of people reporting this has helped them. I have also seen people state that even a restore didnt fix it. it may be helpful to start a thread with just potential solutions, or is there a way to set up a poll on here? so people that have the problem can report sucess rates of each fix tried?

There are many Apps that use location services or notifications. These functions suck up battery power quite quickly. Turn off the items that you do not use regularly (or at all),

See these article links for more information:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/iphone-4s-notifications-location-services- the-bane-of-good-battery-life/5114

http://osxdaily.com/2011/10/17/battery-life-iphone-4s-draining-fix-by-calibratin g/

Best of Luck

Buegie wrote:

There are many Apps that use location services or notifications. These functions suck up battery power quite quickly. Turn off the items that you do not use regularly (or at all),

See these article links for more information:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/mobile-news/iphone-4s-notifications-location-services- the-bane-of-good-battery-life/5114

http://osxdaily.com/2011/10/17/battery-life-iphone-4s-draining-fix-by-calibratin g/

Best of Luck

Yes but apps like Facebook etc. Only check your location once and then it stops (You can tell by the location symbol disapearing) which wont use much battery at all. But with teh clock and other system location services it was checking my location 24/7 which yes uses alot of data. To know what is using data all te time you can check inside the location services and you only need to turn those types of services off

We shut everything off except weather in location services and it still did nothing for the battery issue.

Is it just me, or did taking my bulky rubberized case off (which has the effect of keeping the heat in), significantly improve my battery life?