iPhone 4s Battery Life?

My iPhone 4s battery seems terrible! Almost equivalent to my 3GS and it's terrible battery life. When I got my iPhone yesterday and restored from backup I noticed nothing really changed with minimal usage and standby! Is this normal or should I consider setting it up as a new phone because maybe something is running in the background that's causing it to drop a percentage every few minutes under light usage? Input would be great!

Posted on Oct 15, 2011 7:14 AM

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12,787 replies

Dec 1, 2011 10:14 AM in response to Scarface.

God I hope Apple is actually working on a fix. Has there been any contact by Apple or anything to imply that their working on it. I sincerely hope there solution to the battery problem was 5.0.1 cause that did nothing.


I have hours of unexplained usage. I leave my phone overnight and wake up to my phone almost dead and saying it had a usage of 7 hours when I didn't even touch my phone. So frustrating!

Dec 1, 2011 10:57 AM in response to bleepingApple

I am having nearly identical issues. Does not seem to matter too much if I use it or not, I lose about 7-10% an hour (currently have had average use, off charger for 5 hours and at 60% charge with everything turned off).


Prior to this I had a 4 with 4.2 jailbroken, running a lot of extra apps on top (my memory was almost always <100 meg free), and I would get almost twice the battery life out of it. Something is wrong with 5.0.1, or the hardware.


I did notice that with everything off at a dead idle, I only like 5-7%, however with everything on it's more like 7-10, but my date points are a little off so I don't want to state that definitively.


I'm going back to the apple store today to get another phone, however if this one behaves the same and 5.0.2 doesn't fix it, I'm either rolling back to the 4, or bailing on apple once and for all and getting a Galaxy S II. The current state of their iPhone release pattern is unacceptable.

Dec 1, 2011 11:58 AM in response to toyo8696

toyo8696 wrote:


How can some people assume it is the SIM card when the Verizon models do not have a SIM card but are still having battery problems?

just because on their phone, changing the SIM card

for a new one has totaly solved the PHANTOM USAGE problem

and only that.

Is your reported usage time at least equal to the half od standby time

even if phone is unused for hours ?

Dec 1, 2011 12:27 PM in response to Scarface.

Up until last week I was reliably getting 2.5 to 3 days of battery life with my 4S. I really don't use it that much. 99% of the time the phone is in standby mode. I am on 5.0.0.


Last week, suddenly, my phone started chowing battery. This literally happened overnight. I couldn't even keep the battery going for more than 8 hours without a charge. Aside from a couple phone calls and a 20 minute game of Angry Birds the night before, I didn't use the device the whole day. It is worth mentioning, Angry Birds mysteriously crashed on me twice that evening. Something I'd never seen before. Also worthy of mention, I'd been getting in to the habit of "cleaning" out my apps at the end of the day.


I tried *EVERYTHING* (short of a full reset) to get the battery life back. I disabled EVERYTHING. Not even airplane mode helped.


In a last ditch effort I fully powered the phone off and put it on the charger for a night. During the night the phone automatically powered itself on and I subsequently powered it back down and continued to charge it. The next day, the battery life was slightly better...I managed to get about 16 hours but, not nearly as good as before. I noodled with more settings and played some more Angry Birds. I did not "clean" my apps at the end of the day like I had been. Last night, I charged the phone again while it was awake and today it is back to normal. The phone has now been running for almost 10 hours and has only consumed 10% of its battery life.


My suspicion is that this is a result of a software issue it is an unhandled thread or something of the such. It may be related to a specific app. Angry Birds?

Dec 1, 2011 2:57 PM in response to zSkeptic

I do have latitude (for good or for bad, I like seeing where I'm spending my time) running in the background, so I understand thats using GPS and data from time to time, however that hasn't changed from where I had "ok" battery to now having terrible battery life.


I think I'm just going to have to live with plugging the phone in at work, so that I can still have it usable when I don't go straight home. Or turing off push, lattitude, etc. Shame iPhones don't have the ability to schedule peak and off peak sync settings like you can on androids.

Dec 1, 2011 5:44 PM in response to bleepingApple

I thought this archived thread about the difference between fetch and push mail could be interesting. Under certain scenarios, push may be overrated:


iPhone 3G, Fetch vs. Push - What are the differences?


It may just be fetch 1hr or manual is the safest option. But if you test the differences, that might prove interesting. It's also conceivable that using Exchange with push will yield different results depending on server-side config.


Good luck!

Dec 1, 2011 6:30 PM in response to 1AppleADayNoWay

1AppleADayNoWay wrote:


I thought this archived thread about the difference between fetch and push mail could be interesting. Under certain scenarios, push may be overrated:


iPhone 3G, Fetch vs. Push - What are the differences?


It may just be fetch 1hr or manual is the safest option. But if you test the differences, that might prove interesting. It's also conceivable that using Exchange with push will yield different results depending on server-side config.


Good luck!

Exactly. For me, i set to push because, I have very few emails on the account on my phone. Setting to push will mean, when there is email coming in, server side will push it to the phone. If there is no email, the server will not push. Hence no propagation to the phone.

However, if set to fetch at predefined interval, whether there is email or not, the phone will propagate the server to refresh and check for email... which to me, will be worse for battery life. But if you receive a lot of email every minute, then setting it to fetch every 30 minutes or 60 minutes, will reduce battery drain because the phone propagates the network only once every 30 or 60 minutes to download all the email at one go.


This is my 2 cents worth.

Dec 1, 2011 7:14 PM in response to Scarface.

@Miless - so in the end it all depends... but also there is the possibility that a "push" config may become power hungry in a low reliability network scenario...


@Michael G. - ...or it may be the opposite, i.e. Apple couldn't make a complete fix for the battery issue and it took them a longer time because they didn't have enough feeback from the devices because CIQ was not (entirely) active lollllloll. I mean, when they were calling users to install some sniffing app for debug purposes, was it CIQ? lolll. It used to be Apple "knew" what its users wanted lollll 😉

Dec 1, 2011 7:29 PM in response to 1AppleADayNoWay

1AppleADayNoWay wrote:


@Miless - so in the end it all depends... but also there is the possibility that a "push" config may become power hungry in a low reliability network scenario...


@Michael G. - ...or it may be the opposite, i.e. Apple couldn't make a complete fix for the battery issue and it took them a longer time because they didn't have enough feeback from the devices because CIQ was not (entirely) active lollllloll. I mean, when they were calling users to install some sniffing app for debug purposes, was it CIQ? lolll. It used to be Apple "knew" what its users wanted lollll 😉

CIQ could be place in there by AT&T under their exclusivity deal where AT&T agreed on Apple terms subjected to this to be placed in there.


I hope someone can check if this appears on Verizon's iPhone (iOS 4.5).


But its extremely annoying to know that your every move is being scrutinized.

Dec 1, 2011 7:47 PM in response to miless

Well, according to this http://www.theverge.com/2011/11/30/2601695/carrier-iq-controversy , the answer would be yes for AT&T and no for Verizon... but hopefully some testing app will pop up for the iPhones... with independent testing to validate any of this. Also, on December 14th, the carriers and CIQ will have to formally disclose it all... Extremely annoying. But the upside to the story is further awareness. Unfortunately, the presence or absence of the CIQ software is not the end of the matter, as manufacturers and carriers could develop/use similar yet different software to do exactly the same thing...

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iPhone 4s Battery Life?

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