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!
My 4S was losing about 20% overnight (8 hours) on stand-by and anywhere from 3% to 8% per hour on stand-by at work depending on what seemed to be the time of day and where I was at. Not as bad as what many people are describing but still very poor performance. The battery life has improved considerably and I have been satisfied with the performance over the past few weeks. I have WiFi On, Cell Data On, Siri On, Bluetooth On, Notifications On and Location Service on. For my last test, I purposely used the phone sparingly (3 hours music, 1 hour email/web) to see how long the battery would last:
I do have Siri Raise to Speak and Setting Time Zones off and do not use iCloud. I also do not use the notification center. The main change that has helped my battery life was setting to manually fetch. I believe one or both of my email accounts (MS Exchange and Yahoo) have issues with the Push and Fetch Every XX Minutes option. Using manual fetch is a compromise I can easily live with. Also, if I do see my battery drainage start to accelerate (observed this a couple of times in December), I will look at the CPU Load/Wired Memory and if these areas look high then it's an indication that a runaway process is running in the background. I will then kill the processes through power off, hard reset, soft reset, etc.
I have also been running my 3GS on 5.0.1. It had some battery issues but I was able to fix them through a restore. It is 100% on WiFi and I do have the same email accounts on Push and that does not seem to affect the battery drain. However, the battery is now losing 20% overnight on stand-by so I will go through my reset process tonight.
Good luck!
Hi folks,
I will tell you a story;
My wife have an iPhone 4S 64GB since day 0 (Nov 14th, 11) and battery life is terrible. Several days ago her phone get so hot so she cannot hold it in the hand. She called me and asked what to do with it, my replay is: schedule appointment with apple store Genius bar ASAP.
Apple replaced her phone w/o any questions with bunch of appology's.
Now she have "new" phone and it hold charge not for 5-6 hours but for TWO DAYS till charge droped to 15% or less.
iPhone setup has been restored from latest available backup in iTunes. iOS 5.0.1.
Bottom line; I believed buttery life issue is not a software glitch but problem with hardware itself.
i have the same Battery Issue i Brought 3 days Before Iphone 4S 32 GB in Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia and did Update with 5.0.1 also
and watched whole days and nights here is my timing which i got from my iphone 4s
but apple claim this
But is not the way i brought so expensive phone to turn and remember what i have to do after every 5 or 10 mints to save my battery life
and i have also siri issue its not working as its mention
please give me feedback
You are right about quoting the specs - but the spec itself is misleading. The reason for this is that I believe that the 0.5% per hour standby drain goes on on top of everything else you might be doing. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is that "background processing such as email auto-checking" counts towards "usage" - and of course this happens concurently with everything else. And varying conditions will affect background processing. So in the end, you can never fully isolate the spec components like you did. For instance you might be browsing the web for some hours on 3G but at the same time you will lose 0.5% per hour and you will lose whatever background processing is happening also. Which is why people here trim down many options - especially network centric ones. And then I've seen them get close to spec. A common spec is 5-6hrs of mixed web/call use for 22 hrs of standby. As I've said a long time ago, an Apple day is about 30hrs.
Good luck!
I am also suspecting it is hardware issue because my 4 with 5.01 is fine.
It's kind of funny, since if you did a search for my name, you would find me under Apple Haters. I have never liked Apple, as a company, but decided to buy the 4S because of experience with my wife's 3GS, and the iPhone 4 I used for a month (long story). It is simply head and shoulders above anything else in the market. I very carefully researched, for 6 months, the various smartphones that had the features I wanted, and it came down to the 4S or the Galaxy S II. The 4S won out because Android phones often don't get updates to their OS, and I had used a Windows phone for 2 years with NO updates. Compared with that, Apple's updates are fantastic.
I am not anti-consumer, but I see little benefit in attacking a company you want to help you. Warranties are pretty much local things, so what applies here may not apply where you are. My 30 day free return point ended 2 days ago, and I never once considered returning it.
I'm sorry some people have battery issues, and I'm sorry some people expect too much of the phone. I anticipated that the phone would use more battery power than the 4, but after turning off the things I didn't want, or need, and installing 5.01, I have very good battery life. At some point, I am pretty sure that Apple will announce what they have found relative to battery issues, and I expect those to be multiple causes. I hope they can be corrected via software, but who knows. They WON'T be corrected by legal action, but by talented technologists.
Yes...I am using Verizon.
enx23 wrote:
@Cyberman04
Cyberman04 wrote:
I found that battery life on any cell phone or smartphone will depend on the usage and how the user has it set up. My iPhone 4S battery has lasted me 2.5 days without charging and was down to 1/4 charge by then. That's pretty good battery life. I recommend (if you want to extend battery life) disable location features, auto-checking of email, and either turn off iCloud or just have one item in it activated, such as documents or something. I prefer to sync directly to my mac then having something stored or transfered from and outside source. I hope this helps. Good luck!
Are you on Verizon?
Yes. I have done that. After the 4 I had been replaced by my 4S, I still had it for a few days, and anything that didnt require cell phone service still worked. Presumably, it would also still be possible to use it contact emergency services (911 in the US).
Fair enough! Although I consider sometimes legal can put pressure on technology. We will see I guess!
Take care!
You deserve at least 100Points for these words of wisdom. Finally somebody with something sensitive on this thread which has now over 560 pages:
rphunte42 wrote:
It's kind of funny, since if you did a search for my name, you would find me under Apple Haters. I have never liked Apple, as a company, but decided to buy the 4S because of experience with my wife's 3GS, and the iPhone 4 I used for a month (long story). It is simply head and shoulders above anything else in the market. I very carefully researched, for 6 months, the various smartphones that had the features I wanted, and it came down to the 4S or the Galaxy S II. The 4S won out because Android phones often don't get updates to their OS, and I had used a Windows phone for 2 years with NO updates. Compared with that, Apple's updates are fantastic.
I am not anti-consumer, but I see little benefit in attacking a company you want to help you. Warranties are pretty much local things, so what applies here may not apply where you are. My 30 day free return point ended 2 days ago, and I never once considered returning it.
I'm sorry some people have battery issues, and I'm sorry some people expect too much of the phone. I anticipated that the phone would use more battery power than the 4, but after turning off the things I didn't want, or need, and installing 5.01, I have very good battery life. At some point, I am pretty sure that Apple will announce what they have found relative to battery issues, and I expect those to be multiple causes. I hope they can be corrected via software, but who knows. They WON'T be corrected by legal action, but by talented technologists.
Update on my battery issue...
Following advice on doing a factory reset and starting from scratch, I did just that ! DIDN'T install a backup but downloaded the app's I needed from i-Tunes (and didn't dl a load I don't use), re-configured mails and other data the hard way.
I've turned off the System location things that aren't necessary.
Charged to 100% this morning and 14h10m later, after 3h37 of heavy use (watched 20min of a TV programme in the deal !) the battery indicates 30% remaining.
That means with less intensive (more normal) use, it would now give me 1.5 to 2 days before needing a charge.
It also is no longer indicating that I'm using it when I'm not !
Perfectly acceptable.
So it appears the reloading from a backup may well be the cause ?
Just hope it lasts 😐
marc-man wrote:
Cyberman04 - can you check your 'usage' in the general settings page and tell me if the 'usage' time it reports is inline with your actual usage?
Time since last full charge...
USAGE 2 hrs, 53 min
STANDBY 2 Days, 22 hours
Battery 61%
Cyberman04- How the heck are you getting that good of battery life? I was at 59% battery with 3 hours 47 minutes of usage & 10 hours 48 minutes of standby
You make a good point about never fully isolating the spec components when assessing your usage as compared to the apple specs.
The common spec you listed is about what I'm getting for battery life and I'm happy with it. But I did have battery issues before doing a reset...
My first iPhone had a problem with the camera autofocus not working, but the battery was just fine. I went to the apple store and they gave me a brand new one due to the camera problem because I was within 30 days of purchase.
Immediately I noticed that the new one drained much more quickly and lost significant battery life while on standby mode. I tried deleting my mail accounts, resetting network settings, etc. and nothing worked. Finally, I decided to download the newer build version of 5.0.1 (9A406) -- released in mid December -- which might not have been what fixed my phone, but what was essential is that I did a complete reset and erased all content from my phone. After erasing and reseting everything I synced with iTunes but made sure not restore from a previous backup, i.e., I set it up as a new phone.
I'm not sure if it's true, but I read on various blogs that in some cases doing a restore from a previous backup creates some corrupt files that can drain battery rapidly. By setting it up as a new phone this is avoided. I this is in fact true, I wonder why it only happens to some users...
1AppleADayNoWay wrote:
You are right about quoting the specs - but the spec itself is misleading. The reason for this is that I believe that the 0.5% per hour standby drain goes on on top of everything else you might be doing. That's the first thing. Then the second thing is that "background processing such as email auto-checking" counts towards "usage" - and of course this happens concurently with everything else. And varying conditions will affect background processing. So in the end, you can never fully isolate the spec components like you did. For instance you might be browsing the web for some hours on 3G but at the same time you will lose 0.5% per hour and you will lose whatever background processing is happening also. Which is why people here trim down many options - especially network centric ones. And then I've seen them get close to spec. A common spec is 5-6hrs of mixed web/call use for 22 hrs of standby. As I've said a long time ago, an Apple day is about 30hrs.
Good luck!
I agree with this summary 100%. In many cases, specs are used as a marketing tool and Apple (and all cell phone mfrs) will present the specs in the most positive manner possible. I estimate that I can get roughly 6 to 6-1/2 days of stand-by if I don't touch the phone (with the settings in my last post). That is approximately 80% of the published specs which is reasonable to me.
iPhone 4s Battery Life?
