iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Ok, before i tweaked my 4s, the battery was practically ticking down in standby. I think it was 1% about every 15 minutes or so. something ridiculous anyway. without me actually interacting with the phone at all either.

So I tweaked it to the essentials for me. Went through all the settings etc.

Then I turned off wifi and cell data. i never use bluetooth, so thats always off. which arguably just makes your iphone a normal feature phone and ipod touch.

I think by turning off the radios (wifi, bluetooth, cell data) in the phone, except the gsm radio of course. Is how Apple gets it's 200hr standby-time estimate.

Because after I did all this I charged it back up to 100% and here's the numbers.

Usage 13 mins

Standby 2hrs 21mins

And the battery just went down to 99%!!

It's not a perfect solution, and I say not practical for most users to turn off their wifi and cell data all the time, but if you can bare with it and turn on wifi only when you need it and so forth with cell data as well. Your battery will last much much longer. And plus when you do turn it on it shouldn't drain so much power if you tweaked your phone to only the sevices you need and turn off the ones you don't need. i.e. ping, push email, facebook notifications etc.

I'm really looking forward to hearing your results. I'm having the same issue with my battery draining quickly. I have cycled the battery often (not hard when the phone drains so quickly). I will implement your suggestion tonight, but I was hoping to hear your initial reaction to the fix today.

If your battery is draining as quickly as mine, I figure you should have a result soon.

I have a solution that worked for me. My iPhone is now dropping 1% every hour on standby, with all of the iPhone 4s' "functions" enabled, such as Siri.

1. Backup data to iCloud.

2. Restore iPhone using iTunes. No need to backup to your mac! (it's on iCloud).

3. When setting up phone after fresh restore, disconnect from Mac/PC and set up the iPhone using the setup procedure.

4. Restore iPhone from iCloud backup.

5. When the sync has finished, power off your iPhone.

6. Remove SIM card (if you have one)

7. Turn on iPhone.

8. Go into Settings-iCloud and switch Off Photostream/Documents & Data/Find My iPhone.

9. Minimise Location services, but keep on whatever you want.

10. Go into Settings-General-Date & Time-Switch Set Automatically to Off

11.Go into Settings-General-Restrictions-Switch Ping off (you have to enable a passcode first theough).

12. Go into Settings-WiFi-Switch Ask to Join Networks Off.

13. Go into Settings-Store-Switch off Automatic Downloads.

14. Go into Settings-General-Reset-Reset Network Settings.

This will remove all stored network connections including your WiFi networks from the phone. It will also reset your other data connections to default. This includes 3G connections.

15. When your phone has restarted, switch it off and put your SIM back in (if you have one).

16. Turn the iPhone back on.

17. You'll need to re-enter WiFi information now.

18. Let the battery deplete completely until the phone turns off. Leave it off for 10 minutes. Plug it in and let it charge until it reaches 100%. Leave it plugged in for and extra 10 minutes just to be sure.

A word of warning, location services such as Maps and Find my iPhone use a heck of a lot of power, much more than the iPhone 4 ever used. The update rate of the GPS location is insane. It use to update your GPS location every couple of seconds on the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4s seems to update position every half a second when using maps. If Find my iPhone is doing similar things, no wonder battery life goes down so quickly.

I think that there is also a problem in the Documents & Data and Photostream settings somewhere. With these turned off battery life is dramatically better.

Tried that, still sucky battery life.

Hi,

I'm running an iPhone 4S white 32Gb, on the Three network in the UK. I was originally suffering from really bad battery life and after reading a few articles on the Internet I stumbled upon a thread in the forums on Macumors.com. The thread discusses the use of location services to set your time zone automatically, this setting can be found in System Preferences/ Location Services/ System Services (scroll to the bottom)/Setting Time Zone.

On my iPhone I noticed that this feature had a constant purple arrow next to it indicating it was using my location; even more interestingly this wasn't showing in the upper status bar. While on this settings page I noticed there is an option to display when these system services are using your location, this was off by default. Upon enabling this I could clearly see when the system was using my location, which I monitored this for a while.

It soon became obvious the time zone detection feature was constantly using my location, so last night I disallowed time zone access to use my location and today I've managed to get 2hrs 17mins usage, 9hrs 20mins standby and I've 84% battery remaining.

I suggest that those with battery issues try the same experiment as myself, hopefully this is the solution we've all been looking for.

Regards,

Mike.

I was having big issues with 4s battery life, draining heavily even when it was on standby and noticing it was getting quite warm sometimes as well. Seem to have resolved this by going to settings>general>restrictions, and once you have set up a pass code turn off ping, now getting massivley improved battery life..

I was having the battery drain issue and heating phone as well until I did only one thing, I reset the network settings and now my phone is cool to the touch and battery life is on par with my old iphone4. I think a network setting is getting stuck or is misconfigured coming from the store. I bought mine at the sprint store btw. Right now I am at 94% with 43 min of use and 1 hour 32 min of standby. Before when I was at about 90% I was only at 15 min of usage time. This is much better. I have all email to push, notifications on, location services on. I don't like turning those off because then what is the point of having a phone that can do all that.

Hi All

I think I have sorted mine. I turned off the auto iCloud uploads/updates and my battery has dropped from 100% to 42% in the past 24 hours with moderate usage.

Stats from the phone are:

Usage 2 hours, 57 mins

Standby 1 day

Apple is still saying there are no solutions (on the phone with them now) and they'll give me a new phone.

One person said I have 14 days, another said 30. I'm asking them for the location where the official policy is written.

They also said I can't return it to a store, I have to do it online. Supposedly then they send me an email and I use the number in that email to call AT&T to get everything reverted back to my old iPhone 4. This feels like its going to be a nightmare, has anyone done it yet?

Are any of you who are now reporting satisfactory battery life using calendars with OTA synching?

My iPhone 4S battery drops 1% for 10 minutes at standby. I restored the same backup on the 4 and only 4S just so fly - this is not normal. Only in airplane mode iPhone not drainig battery. My friend has the same iPhone (4S 32GB White) and in him there is no problem, the phone keeps almost the same as 4 - *** Apple?!

The question about restrictions is, if they are already OFF, what difference would having ping ON do? Also, when I turn them ON and setup a pin, just to turn OFF ping, then when I turn them OFF again, PING goes back to ON even though overall restrictions are OFF

I was seeing terrible battery life as well. My AT&T 4S went from a full charge to 56% by the end of the work day. I had hardly used it -maybe turned it on and checked email and texts 5 times. I have iCloud and Exchange accounts set to push. Turning them to fetch didn't seem to help anything. Turning off Time Zone monitoring didn't seem to help either.

However yesterday for the first time I noticed my battery wasn't draining like crazy. The only difference - my wifi was enabled but not connected to the access point at work.

So does leaving wifi on fix the problem? I don't know. It was connected to my network at home before I got to work. Maybe the wifi itself has nothing to do with it.

Perhaps the scheduler for iCloud backups was stuck running in the background and it was finally able to complete yesterday morning before I left for work.

For the second day in a row, I've done the same thing. Let my phone charge while locked and with wifi on. It's been at 98% for two hours now.

So try the following:

1) Just leave your wifi on

2) Allow iCloud to complete a full backup

Hope this helps.

What does the Traffic setting do? I was going to turn it off, but I'm not sure what it does.

This is not a problem of settings, or icloud, or GPS, or anything else. Two identical phones work completely differently, what many people here acknowledge. Let Apple be better to move, and either issue a patch IOS, or replace all defective pieces.

JonGoldman: There are procedures described in my posts above in this forum & couple of other guys who suggested the same as well. Search for my name & look at them to resolve your battery issue. You dont need to return. This worked for me. I have all the features turn ON too.