iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Hi Everyone,

I have a 4S with 5.1.1 since it was released. Battery has been great since 5.1 up until three days ago. Now phone runs very hot and drains battery from 100% to zero over 5 hours or so in standby and up to 1% per minute when in use. It has been running so hot that it is almost too hot to hold and yesterday it overheated and put up the overheat warning screen.

If I put it in airplane mode or turn off mobile data then problem stops, it stays cool and the battery does not drain any faster than it used to. Mobile data is slower than usual and and I seem to drop network connections more often. If I am in a wi-fi zone then the phone runs hot and the battery still drains but not as fast.

I have not added any new apps recently. I have done some hard re-sets. I have removed and re-installed my e-mail accounts and calenders as well as resetting network settings. The latter seemed to help until I used safari with mobile data and then it started to run hot again and despite putting the phone back into standby the battery has drained fast and it has got very hot again. From what I have read this is likely to be due to corrupt firmware, causing the processor or data connection to cycle continuously, draining power and generating heat.

I expect that setting up as a new phone and not restoring from my icloud back-up would resolve it. However I do not want to loose my app data and sms messages unless I have to (I wish apple would give us more control over our backups and save these to icloud separately). I admit I have not had time to read all 837 pages of this thread but i was wondering if anyone has had exactly the same problem and has a solution that has worked other that than resetting mail/calenders or network settings as I have tried.

Thank you.

NDLH

Take it to an APPLE Store, show them how it's heating up and they will replace it.

Cheers thanks for that it has helped me

"My old Nokia E75, by contrast, still wakes me up each morning after being cast aside for a month!"

Specs from the E75 website. First I guess this isn't a true smartphone so doesn't consume a lot of data like the iPhone does. Second the screen is much smaller so consumes less power. Third the battery specs it shows are worse than the iPhone.

BATTERY Standard battery, Li-Ion 1000 mAh (BL-4U)

Stand-by Up to 280 h (2G) / 264 h (3G)

Talk time Up to 5 h 20 min (2G) / 4 h 12 min (3G)

Music play Up to 25 h

1AppleADayNoWay wrote:

It's normal you'd get only a - tiny - fraction of that if you really use the phone

Well that's not Standby then is it?

If the spec is up to 200 hours Standby and when the device is in Standby you're lucky to get double-digit hours out of it then it's one of two things:

- unrealistic, misleading specifications (which Apple are making a habit of)

- the device has a design problem (be it hardware or software)

That 200 hours listed is exactly that. 200 hours of standby if you don't use the phone at all and let it stay in standby mode. When you use the phone it decreases that time because e phone isn't in standby. It amazes me how some of you think the numbers they list is what you should get. If you actually read the spec it says up to not a definite you will get this. Also the other times are listed when they use the phone specifically for that mode. When you use the phone normally then you decrease all the numbers because you are varying your use from what they tested in a lab environment.

If you don't like it then go get an android phone. I bet you won't get what they advertise either. Learn what standby actually is before spouting off next time.

KC7GNM wrote:

[...]

If you don't like it then go get an android phone. I bet you won't get what they advertise either. [...].

Don't forget WP and Blackberry! And now even an intel medfield based smartphone, single core basically yielding the same performance as 2/4 core arm handsets, with up to 2 days of light use. Android can do good at this point too. The question is can you make it through the day with full fledged use - calling, texting, browsing, streaming, casual gaming, mailing, reading etc. Maybe some people were used to a greater battery performance from Apple's products and they've also increased their usage pattern and changed how frequently they use the device and the apps etc. This combined with shorter standby time than with the 4 and a background processing prone default configuration, and you have a recipe for a very long thread in your forums it seems. Nothing we haven't discussed here in so many pages lolll.

For god's sake let this thread die.It's got so ridiculous and BORING!!!!

Well it is a real issue for many people, if you ******* would stop arguing with each other for a moment and filling up this thread with useless crap.

I got my 4s in January and loved the battery life until May.. I always charge overnight.... but in May suddenly my battery would be almost gone by noon. I tried some various fixes and something worked, but I'm not sure what, since I adjusted many settings at the same time. (I do not have an exchange server so I didn't try that one). At that time I thought maybe it was related to the app Craigspro running an automatic search for me, which I deleted, among the many adjustments I made.

It started again a few days ago... the main thing I notice when I am having the battery problem and I check my "time since last full charge" in Usage... it will say that my usage and my standby are exactly the same, even if I have not been using the phone. This explains it dying by noon, say I take it off the charger at 6:30 am and it is in full usage until noon that is about 5.5 hours. The issue seems to be that I am not using the phone, but something is. I do not have the Craigspro app running any searches so I don't think that is the problem.

I've tried a few hard resets and that doesn't really help. I haven't tried the "reset all settings as new phone" route yet. I've come to conclude it is a software bug of some sort, maybe in an app, or maybe related to iCloud in some way... I hope it gets fixed cause otherwise I love this phone!

Check /Settings/About/Diagnostic... for some info about what's happening maybe...

You're using Conspiracy Keanu wrong.

Granted.

I think there are some people on here just determined to get this thread to 1000 pages just for the sake of it.

I think there are some people here just determined to get this thread to stop after 837 pages just because they think they know better. If you're not interested just move on and please stop trolling. Have you said a single other thing in this thread than repeating that the thread is too long, boring, ridiculous? Your own comments are not the most exciting you know. If you can't stop checking or have other first world issues, don't blame the thread. Thank you.

You should try a hard reset. It is likely that something relative to the communications didn't terminate properly and is still trying in the background. This isn't all that rare a problem. If power cycling doesn't do the job, look in the manual for 'reset' Basically, you hold the sleep button, and home button until the apple appears.