Hello everybody.
In my personal opinion, the battery drain issue on the iPhone 4s is a HARDWARE issue for some of the users reporting problems. There are certainly software issues, like the location-services-associated battery drain, however there is a HARDWARE issue as well.
Want proof? Here's my experience.
Me and my girlfriend both bought an iPhone 4s. I got a black 32 GG, she got a white 16GB phone.
We each had an iPhone 3GS before that, upgraded to IOS 5.0 with iCloud on.
Day 1-5:
I shut down both 3GS, removed the sim cards, put them into the two new 4s and "transferred" all of our settings through iCloud to the new phones.
Result: Both phones' batteries sucked. I read the various forum posts, played around with the settings, deleted icloud, deactivated push, changed the location services, etc. This all brought some help and in the end my black 4s had better battery life than the one of my girlfriend. I changed all settings ob BOTH phones at the same time, in the same way. We both have the same apps installed (actually I have a couple more than my girlfriend has, but she does not have any, that I don't have).
Day 6-9:
The IOS 5.0.1 update arrived. This made battery life marginally better for both phones.
I kept tricking around with the settings more, setting up the phones as new ones twice (and manually adapting all settings, no syncing!), performing a dozen or so "hard" resets, a couple complete battery recharges. This only helped my 4s, my girlfriend's iPhone kept running low on battery very quickly.
Day 10:
Today my black 32 GB iPhone 4s had 30% battery left when I left work in the evening. Its battery had been recharged 50 hours ago for the last time. Wifi&3G were on for over 40 hours during those 50 hours (the other 10 it was on airplane mode). I had used it to surf the net on several occasions, type iMessages, e-mail, facetime and call people 4 times. Push E-mail through Google was on during all that time.
2 days of "normal" use and standby at nights led to 30% of battery left. That's good for me.
My girlfriend's phone had to be recharged overnight yesterday, after having shut itself down because of low battery. I took it off the charger today at 8:00 AM, it had 100% battery left at that point. She called me at work 7 hours later. Her iPhone had 60% battery left. In these 7 hours, she only wrote two short e-mails, the rest of the time the phone was on standby.
She returned it to the mobile company's store today and will get a new one within the next week.
Both iPhones have identical settings, identical apps. We both sync mail from 2 E-mail-Accounts: one ISP-POP3-Server and Google-Mail. Our contacts and calenders are synced through google. I actually use Facebook too with Push on, my girlfriend had't had the opportunity to initiate the app in the past weeks.
I performed all resets, erased the phones, set them up as new ones one after the other. No setting is different on the one phone, than on the other.
And still: One phone has about 3 times more battery life than the other.
For me, this can only mean one: a HARDWARE problem. Are we the only ones experiencing this? Perhaps.
I think however, that some of the users, who have tried EVERYTHING and still didn't see any improvement, may actually have the same problem like us.