iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Just wanted to post an update. I got my 4s on launch day with Verizon. It's a black 64 GB model. Restored from my Touch backup which I had upgraded to iOS5 a few days before. Was having incredible battery drain. Went from 100% to 55% in 7 hours just sitting in standby. I did all the tricks previously mentioned without relief.

What worked for me was draining the battery until the phone shut itself off (I used a flashlight app and YouTube). I then charged overnight to 100%. With moderate use today, I'm at 66% right now with several text, emails, phone calls, GPS, and 3G web surfing. I couldn't be happier with the improvement. Give this drain and recharge a chance if you haven't previously.

I've tried most of the previous mentioned things and they have helped somewhat (I've done a DFU Restore, but I restored from an iTunes backup, not from iCloud. I'll try the DFU restore combined with an iCloud restore after work).

Here's the latest thing that I changed and it seems to have made a difference... Go to Settings-->General-->Network, turn off Voice Roaming and Data Roaming. After doing this, I seem to have only dropped 2% over 2 hours (that's a rate of 1% per hour). I didn't touch my phone at all during that time and only received one text message. Prior to that change, I was getting 3% loss per hour with light usage.

--iPhone 4s, black, 32 GB, Verizon

Genius Bar appointment today resulted in DFU Restore from iCloud. No difference noted since. Battery down additioanl 15% in the hour after leaving the store with moderate use (only 2 very short calls, a couple emails and a bit of surfing). That's with most location settings off, wifi off, bluetooth off, etc.

Am doing a complete drain now (for the 4th time) and going to give it one more shot.
The guy who helped me has a 4S with no similar problems.

If same problem tomorrow, will exchange for a new 4S to see if I might randomly get lucky and get one thats problem free. If that doesn't work, I'll be convinced its a bug to be fixed later and will probably get a Mophie product in the interim so my phone isn't 50% by noon and dead at the end of each work day.

I'm an Apple convert. Switched to MacBook Pro last year. This is my first iPhone (said goodbye to my trusty bberry). Must say that I'm extremely disappointed with the recent battery problems. First, MacBook pro battery life cut in half by Lion upgrade (still unresolved). Now this (still unresolved). Unfortunate.

64 Gig ATT

What worked for me was the iCloud restore. My guessing is that iCloud backup doesent carry over the setting that is caueing the battery drain.

1. I tried the Network settings reset which seemd to wor a little but not much

2. Backup your device to iCloud

3. Do a full DFU restore

4. Plug your device into iTunes if it isent allready and let it sync all your data

5. Get the device to run to 0% percent and shut off

6. Charge till the device is 100% with half an hour trickle charge (Where you leave the device at 100% and still chargeing) I recomend the app battery doctor for this as it will show you the time remaining and set an alarm for when its fnished if you want.

7. I also have the system location services disabled such as location based iAds and Setting Time Zone and some of the others i dident want. These would effect any device and they dont provide any purpose than giving apple statistical data.

I lost 4% battery in standy over night with all connections running, so the device was still fetching my email every hour and other services which fecth data such as Facebook so this loss in conciderible seeing as i slept for 10 hours.

And as for actual use time I have been reading emails, playing some angry birds, listening to music, just genreal use as i would before iOS 5 battery drain and i have got 8 - 9 Hours use and i have got 14% left.

Hope this helps and please report back in reply to this if it worked so others can try this fix. As i know how worried/frustrated people must be after spending alot of money on there new devices to have them not work.

Note: People on twitter with all devices from 3Gs to 4s are having the problems after upgrading to iOS 5. So its not the devices

Good luck 🙂

Syther101

I wonder what the actual percentage of phones are having this issue. I mean there are millions sold.

I may have spoken too soon--I lost another 1% in just 20 minutes and the only thing I did was power on the screen to see the battery %!

I found that the best and strongest charge happened when the percentage reaches 100%, power down and keep charging the phone for another 15-30 minutes, then power up and unplug the phone from the charger.

Wait, you are saying that I can get more then 6:45 hours of usage and 1 day and 19 hours standby? But I already have all the settings you mentioned (Bluetooth, location, wifi) turned off--unless I am at home, then wifi comes on. I didn't understand your suggestion, since what I was saying is that aparrently there is a "glitch" in the iOS 5 that is causing drastically battery drains. I hope, like you and many others, this will be resolved soon. As for my Apple diagnostic, they didn't found anything wrong, put of ordinary, with my battery. Though, they learned that MobileMe is one of the issues...

I agree, I think the fact that some people have the probelm and some dont, its clearly and IOS 5 glitch, especially that people with IP4 and 3GS are all expereincing problems after getting IOS5..apple just needs to address with an update and stop the headache. I went to apple yesterday, they found nothing, in the end gave me a different phone and I am not sure if that really made a difference...I did all the things people are talking about..i cant believe how many times I restored my phone...and how many settings I played with...nothing makes a huge difference...so its either SIRI, IOS5 or apple just plain didnt get the battery size right this time...the weeks to come will tell I guess...Ill keep draining and charging my phonee..but I'm done trying to restore the phone and toggle all these settings...i can turn wifi, bluetooth, and push stuff around and location stuff...as a new user to iphone, i was hoping I would get away from all the phone manipulation that Android required and which was also the reason I came to apple...but maybe i'm not so lucky..

Apple gave me another iP4S today and we'll see how it goes. I can't connect to the iOS5 argument as my iPad has the same configuration and my iP4 has only minor differences and they have not been losing power like my first iP4S.

Do you think apple would have that many phones with bad batteries?

In my opinion this is not the fault of the battery, only iOS or any component inside. Try turning on airplane mode and then use the phone (though hard to use without internet then), then the battery goes down very slowly.

Has there been any kind of response from Apple yet about this ?

Sorry my post wasn't clear enough. When you perform a clean restore and set up your iPhone as a new phone. The phone with it's default settings shouldn't be using much power at all. Especially if WiFi, Bluetooth and location services are turned off. If you go through all of the settings and turn everything off (Siri, Facetime, iMessage, Ping, Notifications), apart from mobile data this will essentially make your iPhone into a telephone. If it uses more than 1% of battery in under lets say 90 minutes in this state, I think that there is a problem with your SIM. In this state I burnt through 22% in 6.5 hours with the SIM straight out of my IPhone 4 that I bought last year. Which is rediculous. I swapped it out for my girlfriends brand new SIM that came with her iPhone 4s and left it overnight and it was using 1% every 2 hours. Big difference!

Nope, nothing from Apple yet. Are we surprised?

They either know exactly what the problem is and are preparing a update, which is in testing right now. Or they are unsure what the problem is and are data crunching like crazy.

Either way I wouldn't fancy their jobs right now.