iPhone 4s Battery Life?

For nearly two months I had been suffering from terrible battery life and phantom usage (usage always approx half of standby). Just before Christmas I updated to the 9A406 build of ios5.0.1. After that I was getting brilliant battery life. 4+ days with light usage and no signs of significant Phantom usuage. However, over the past week all my previous problems have returned. I'm back to 3% drop an hour and lots of Phantom activity. I had not changed anything on the phone since installing 9A406 and had not synched with iTunes. Has anyone else experienced the same with 9A406?

Well let's see, HMMM

You're phone is paired to a bluetooth device and it happens to be in your car ???

When paired, ALL sound will be routed to that device.

I'd check that one.

😢

Unfortunately pal I don't have a bluetooth headset, or a bluetooth enabled car. So there is NO bluetooth issue at work here. The external speaker refused to work alongwith the earpiece.

I later identified the problem. It seems as if the phone was stuck in the earphone's plugged in mode. How that happened is anybody's guess but it was a hardware issue because I restored the firmware from scratch and the problem persisted.

After 4 hours it magically vanished. No clue how it happened, and no clue how it un-happened. After the restore the battery has so far dropped 2% in 14 minutes with WiFi connected but all push notifications off.

You can try installing "Process Killer", an app that remove apps from RAM. You can tell what app keeps running in the background without you opening it.

I perform the kill process once in a while. And it seems to help me a lot.

Also, I perform reset all settings after installing 9A406.

It helps me to reduce drain to around 1% per hour in standby.

Again why should the consumer do anything to try to fix a problem that's is 100% Apples fault and problem. No matter how you cut it they sold the I Phone 4s without adequate testing and research. You pay for a new phone that you are told will work as designed and it does not. Not just one phone but hundreds of thousands of them do not work as advertised or as designed. The consumer has once again been screwed by a major corporation I see Apple still advertising the 4s with not mention of all the problems.....Uh is it not fraud when you know its a faulty product and you are continuing to sell it without mention of the problems. It just makes me laugh at all of the people on here say turn this off turn this on do this do that, stand on your head and face east and chant apple apple apple. You pay for a new phone you should be able to turn it on and go. Apple is at fault needs to make this up to everyone they have knowingly sold a faulty product to.........Its the right thing to do..

Well you CAN turn it on and go if you want. However the items being mentioned here are so you can "go" longer by turning off items you dont necessarily need. Everyone dont need everything. Like if you dont travel, you most likely dont need the Time Zone constantly checking on where you are using up battery that you could be using for something you DO use. Or Groupons sending you alerts to the screen when you already get an email from them with the special of the day. So certainly you can have all the features on but that will require power to make it all work. Thats all we are saying here (and Apple on their battery page) They make a LOT of features to meets LOTS of folks needs but no one needs ALL the features all the time (typically). For the folks who may happen to have to use all the features, well you will have shorter battery life. Just that simple.

Also some of the older apps are not iOS5 optimized so they will kill your battery too.

Vomgottsland wrote:

Again why should the consumer do anything to try to fix a problem that's is 100% Apples fault and problem. No matter how you cut it they sold the I Phone 4s without adequate testing and research. You pay for a new phone that you are told will work as designed and it does not. Not just one phone but hundreds of thousands of them do not work as advertised or as designed. The consumer has once again been screwed by a major corporation I see Apple still advertising the 4s with not mention of all the problems.....Uh is it not fraud when you know its a faulty product and you are continuing to sell it without mention of the problems. It just makes me laugh at all of the people on here say turn this off turn this on do this do that, stand on your head and face east and chant apple apple apple. You pay for a new phone you should be able to turn it on and go. Apple is at fault needs to make this up to everyone they have knowingly sold a faulty product to.........Its the right thing to do..

My Iphone 4G suddenly started to drain battery, but now it seems okay. Fresh charge in the morning and it only loses about 10% per hour when no apps are running. I usually charge it when I get how for work in case I want to make a phone call in the evening.

10% AN HOUR???? It depends on your settings and usage, of course, but to me, that's poor battery life (if you only make 1 or 2 calls and most of the time is standby)!! Be more specific about your settings/usage please...

I rarely make any calls from my Iphone during the day and this drastic change in battery life happened in a week. I have most location settings off (except traffic, which I don't know what is) and Bluetooth also off. Email is set to check every hour. I'm not sure what else I can disable and what functions I will lose. I guess switching off WiFi will save me some battery when I'm not home, but I don't think I will bother with turning it off/on depeding on where I am.

It was like this a few months ago too, but got better. Not really sure what I can do...

Be careful. MANY of us experience accpetable battery life while connected to wifi, only to have the draining problem rear its ugly head when we go back to a cellular data connection. I'm convinced that this problem is 100% related to how iOS5 manages cellular data connections and the new dual antenna setup in the 4s.

iau wrote:

I rarely make any calls from my Iphone during the day and this drastic change in battery life happened in a week. I have most location settings off (except traffic, which I don't know what is) and Bluetooth also off. Email is set to check every hour. I'm not sure what else I can disable and what functions I will lose. I guess switching off WiFi will save me some battery when I'm not home, but I don't think I will bother with turning it off/on depeding on where I am.

It was like this a few months ago too, but got better. Not really sure what I can do...

I made some tests, and i found that the problem isn't the wifi or cellular data, but just the cellular connection:

when I left it overnight without charging (with wifi) it lost about 60%...(the same with wifi off) when I left it in air plane mode it lost 4%... And when I just took the SIM-card out, but let wifi on, it also lost 4%...

so it's the cellular connection, (of course then also the data, but just turning that off doesn't help...)

well that were my results, and I don't know if you have the same problems, but you can also try it and see if your behaviour is similar... well im my case it's the cellular connection, but I don't know what's the problem (if it keeps trying to look for networks, for example...) but i'm really sure this is a software problem, because I already switched my iPhone, and the problem stayed... And I hope this get's fixed soon, I hope it for Apple and for us all

Regards

Very interesting results. My reception often vary depending on the weather (ice, snow) and right now are not hte best (2-3 bars). It's just that it has gotten worse the last couple of weeks without any change in my use. Will keep an extra eye on the reception.

And what about those of us who do all that? I don't have notifications, location, time zone or Siri on. I don't allow my mail or calendar to automatically do anything. Everything is set to manual. What's the point of that? I'd be happy just to go back to IOS 4 on my 3gs.

I quite fail to understand why so many users seem to charge their phones, then go to bed and let it sit on standby all night. For over a year, my wife had charged her 3GS overnight, every night, and that makes sense to me. The phone gets a full charge, and she doesn't need it during the night anyway, as she doesn't talk on the phone in her sleep. So, I do the same, and I always have plenty of power at the end of the evening. That solves the 33% loss you had, and moves that to the period of time you might actually use the phone. Now, you used 23% charge in 7 hours, which is about 3% an hour, so you would get about 30 hours to use your phone in one day. Maybe I am too easy, but that sounds adequate, if not particularly great, to me.

elephantjuice wrote:

Upgraded to a shiny new 4S a few days ago and whilst the phone itself is excellent, battery life has been disappointing. I think the main issue I'm having is that the battery is draining significantly during standby.

Last night I tested this by charging to 100% before bed. 7 hours later the battery was at 77% with no usage whatsoever and minimal features enabled + background apps closed.

You've completely missed the point of my post.

The point is that the phone is losing over 3% of charge per hour during standby, i.e. no use whatsoever with most features disabled which to me seems to be on the steep side.

You've based the 30 hours on the rate of battery consumption I'm getting during standby. This figure is significantly increased during the daytime (which of course is to be expected with usage and various features enabled) and results in around 15 hours or so before it needs to be charged again. If I could get 30 hours from my phone in one charge you would not hear me complaining 😉

Also, I would normally charge my phone overnight but as stated I said I was testing the state of the battery during standby, hence the reason it was charged to 100% and left overnight, so I could observe the rate of battery consumption whilst the phone was not in use.

That's the reason why i also don't always leave my phone charging overnight. And because i work on shifts, i can't always charge it overnight.

Look at this and tell me that my phone doesn't have a problem:

Usage time simply not true! Made 2 calls (one of 5minutes and the other one of 10minutes), listened to some music for 15/20minutes, used Wi-fi for 5 minutes. BAM! It only lasted 22h:35minutes (to 20%, which is when it's supposed to get a charge on a regular basis) and marked 13h:55m of usage time!! I consider this to be VERY light usage...wouldn't you agree?!

This gets worst if you consider the list of changes i have implemented in order to try to get a better battery lifetime:

- Auto-Screen brightness Off, with dimmed screen (20% maybe);

- Location Services/system services ALL off;

- Notifications set to Manual, only having "phone and text messages" on notifications centre;

- Wi-fi off (only turned it On for 5 minutes);

- Cellular Data off;

- Network Auto-detection set to off;

- iCloud off;

- Erased all e-mail acounts and set Push to off/Fetch set to Manual;

- Diagnosis set to "Don't Send";

- Bluetooth off;

- Restrictions off (already tried to turn them on and disable Ping, iTunes and Facetime - saw no change);

- No SIM lockout;

- Auto lockout set to 1 minute;

- Closed ALL pages openned in Safari before exit;

- All apps mannualy closed in multi-task bar;

- Removed the iCalendar from the Notification Center (saw a video in youtube suggesting this might be the problem);

- Siri/"Speak to raise" off (after turning it off, turned the phone off and on because there was a known bug that kept the sendor working even after ticking it to off);

- Vibration on only in Silent Mode...

- I've done several restores in DFU Mode and already let the phone drain the battery to 0% 4 ot 5 times (which is more than i wanted!!) and nothing, REALLY NOTHING, seems to fix it!!

Only 2 things left to do before i send it to warranty:

- removing the SIM card and watch the Standby/Usage time meters (i've read some posts suggesting that the SIM might be accountable for the "phantom usage")...

- install iOS 5.1 when it's released (to be sure if this is a software or hardware problem). If it takes more than a week to get out, i might even not install it...not waiting much more time than that...