iPhone 4s Battery Life?

foreshay: I have been following these threads all day since morning, havent seen anyone state that their 5 had better battery performance than 4. In fact everytime I use SIRI I see a drastic drop in battery. Also people who have upgraded their iPhone 4 to iOS5 have seen a decline in their battery life. I am one among them. I gave my iPhone4 to my wife & upgarde to iOS5. I clearly seen the decline in battery performance. Before that when I was using it for a year, it was just awesome, charing once in 2 days.

Totally agree with your post jrnavid.... I had called before & I insist all here to call APPLE support about this issue PLEASE. You dont have to wait for too long.. they are fairly quick to get to....Thanks guys

i was having battery problem as well. i just restored my iphone 4s to facory default and reinstalled everything individually and not through my backups. i disabled some of the things posted earlier, ie. notification, location. we'll see if it does get improve. otherwise, im gonna end up getting a refurb replacement phone from apple for my NEW phone. :-(

Why do you assume others have "great battery life" and the battery is faulty? Once the settings are fixed the battery is working as expected. Some upgrades and system restores did something odd to many phones. Considering the amount sold and the general fix of turning off and adjusting things that are battery hogs and not needed to be turned on in the 1st place is not an indicator of a faulty battery.

I say this because my roommate and I both got the 4s on the same day. We both charged them up, installed similar apps, and the difference in battery life is NIGHT and DAY. What makes it worse is I'm a light user and he's streaming Netflix and downloading music, using Siri, constantly playing with google maps etc. I had him make sure all of his settings were identical to mine. Even still, his battery is working like a champ. We iMessaged for 12 min and I lost 10% battery life. He lost 0%.

Just got off the phone with iPhone Customer Support. Guy told me to do a few things. Which I'm pretty skeptical about.

1. Check Wi-Fi.

My wifi was turned off all day while at work, and turned on only when I returned home.

2. Notifications

He told me to turn them off. I told him that's not an option...so obviously Apple hasn't fully trained their staff on the 4S. He then saw that it should be set to 'Manually,' which is what I had it set to in the first place.

3. Location services.

I had FB, IMDB, Maps, Siri, Weather on. He told me to turn off FB and IMDB.

4. Brightness

I always adjust it myself. But for testing purposes he wanted me to put it on Auto-Brightness, and to leave it to less than half.

5. General <Auto-Lock.

I always have that to Never because I always put my phone to sleep when *I* want to. But for testing again I turned it to 2 minutes.

6. Bluetooth

I never use it.

7. Email

I have several emails connected to my phone for work, personal, junkmail account, and I have it set to Fetch 15 minutes, thats what I had for my iPhone 4 too. He told me to set it to 30 minutes. So for testing I did change it.

I think that's it...

So I did change things for testing purposes. Was told to call back when the phone is almost dead tomorrow after I do a full re-charge.

I'm definitely not going to keep a lot of these settings though, because like I said on my 4 I had these settings and had NO problems at all.

Phone has been on its own for 12 hours and I'm at 26%...With 4.5 hours usage.

Sad face.

I recently bought the 4S - 32GB (White), and my battery lasted 2.5 hours on a full charge with medium usage. That is not acceptable.

Folks, I just got off the phone with APPLE tech support as well. He confirmed that this forum is actually very closely monitored 24 X 7 by APPLE support teams & things that are wide spread are reported to R&D for action. So its not that we are just blabberring here, someone has an eye on this which is good to know.

Second, he suggested to turn off things as well, but I rejected & shot back saying that these are features to use & not turn off. He completely agreed with me. So he dug into his internal support servers looking for an official battery issue threads & found a few. He then suggested 2 things that might help improve the battery life.

1. Back up your iPhone on to the iCloud. ( Note music on iCloud, the ITunes match is not yet available until next week, so music stays on your iTunes computer back up) If you dont have enough space like I did, then make sure you have backed up your phone content on iTunes first. Then do a 'Erase All Content & settings' under General | Reset pages. Start as a new phone go thru all the initial settings & then restore from iCloud back-up. Dont connect to Laptop yet. Once iCloud back-up is done then hook up to Laptop for music etc back-up ( note you need to create a name@me.com email in order to get into iCloud). He believes that when you restore back-up for first time on your new iPhone 5 which will be from your iTunes from your previous iPhone4 or 3GS, there are some options that are not super optimized for iPhone5 & this can cause battery issues which I thought was sensible enough.

2.Second option, He suggested after trying the above, another option is to drain the battery to its last drop & let it go dead when you are using it. Once drained completely then plug it into the wall ( not your Laptop) to charge to 100%. This has apparently helped another case who had the same issue as we all have. He called the battery draining process with some name that I dont remember now, but pretty much a complete drain of your gas tank & refill to 100%. Its like you are flushing you toilet clean.

I did the first one just now & waiting for my app's to back up. I will share the outcome of my trails of the above to see it this fixes the battery issues. He strongly believes that there shouldnt be a battery degradation with 4S for what ever reason. He indicated that the iOS5.1 is already in works for other updates, but unless this is a wide spread issue there will not be any fixes for this one. He also said that there could be some batch manufacturing issues with batteries if this is the case, they will replace for free. Hope this helps..Lets see. Good night folks.

OK, I just got off the phone with Apple support and ironically I was the first one this rep heard today regarding this battery eating issue so the word is still early getting out. She was extremely nice and sympathetic to the issue and I advised there are forums here that must be getting some looks by some techs hopefully. I suggested that she note that anyone who does bring their phone back - can the battery and/or overall view of the phone be looked at and analyzed? Certainly this is a valid issue with this many people sounding off. I advised that if I were to bring my 4S in for a replacement battery, certainly I would like it tested before I leave. Obviously the battery drain kicks in mighty fast so anyone who does bring theirs in should be able to tell within 20 minutes. This would be then verified with an Apple employee and then hopefully this speeds up the great mystery.

That said, I was advised by Apple that quite possibly an app or several apps could be draining the phone as they may not be fully functional with IOS5. That got me thinking - so I figured what the heck and erase and reset my 4S again and install as a "a new iPhone" as opposed to the iTunes sync. What I did first to test this was just to load my 3 e-mails in the phone - notifications off and fetch "hourly." What I noticed so far as I have been typing this is pretty dramatic. The phone was at 24% when I reset it. I decided to plug it in to an electrical outlet while I loaded the 3 e-mails into the phone and as of yet, have not synced it up, therefore not loaded ANY apps yet. Well, between loading the e-mails and typing this (20 minutes later), the battery percentage rocketed to 47%. Incidentally, yesterday it took over an hour to make a move like this - of course this is with all my apps loaded on. So, it may be interesting if this turns out to be an app thing. Could be a long time to determine as it will be a painful process if I have to load one app at a time, test the battery, etc.

Anyway, keep Apple informed as I hope they have an official statement soon. Just another "possibility" of what this issue is.

sorry folks, its late here, I really meant iPhone 4S & NOT iPhone 5.

I had the hot phone and very rapid battery drain problem. I had done a restore from my 3GS to the 4S and it was sucking battery from day 1. I turned off all kinds of stuff. Finally just erased all setting and data (factory reset). Have installed all my main apps again and left on things like wifi, Siri, find phone, bluetooth, etc. Battery is completely fine now. 74% after 10 hours with a couple phone calls, emails, surfing, etc.

My theory is it was an artifact of the restoration process. No amount of power optimization would cure it, but at least it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem...

Mine is also Bad, and i have compared it to my wife's 4S.

Same phone same setup this is the results

Wife's: usage 7 Hours, 11 Hours standby and currently 32%

Mine: 5 hours usage and 9 hours standby and currently 12%

Only thing i think could be using up more power is im on 3G at work and she is on wifi at home.

I am also going to turn off iMessage as i believe this could be connecting alot more over 3G compared to normal sms.

Tomorrow i have a Apple Genius appointment for a 3G (repair) and i might have a talk to them about my 4S battery life! will post back.

Here is my brief tests from tonight:

I charged the phone from 0% to 100%, removed from charging, and let idle for 90 mins. I had everything turned on that I would normally have turned on every day. I didn't not use the phone and just let it idle. This resulted in a 15% battery loss life in just a mere 90 minutes of idling.

Now at 85% life, I shut both my calendars off in the mail accounts section for both my exchange accoutn and gmail, I made no other changes. I again, left the phone complete idle. This resulted in a 2% battery loss over 90 minutes.

I then backed up my contacts, reminders, calendars, and bookmarks to icloud and did a full reset from within the settings (general > reset > erase all content and settings). I added nothing back to the phone and this resulted in a 1% loss over about 50 minutes or so.

My plan is to leave this setup through the whole day tomorrow to give it a througho test. I will not add anything other than the icloud stuff i need to get through the work day. I will then report back battery life. As of this moment, shutting off my calendar is giving me comparable results to freshly wiped phone.

I do not claim this is the problem with everyone, or that it's a fix. This is me simply thinking out loud and trying to find my own way to get through a work day without turning my phone into a glorified ipod.

Thanks.

OK so yesterday I posted about me finding the same problem as Alex regarding the potential Timezone bug.

Yesterday, I got up, used phone a bit, had a shower, drove to work (with bluetooth handsfree attached), and battery was at 89%. So basically about 1 hour 35 mins on standby and use.

Today, same again, but now at 99% when I got to work.

So I'm hoping thats sorted, but will report back later.

hi everybody

I have a 3GS and put OS5

so no SIRI

still the batt drained like ****

tested some things and after few days of testing and using it it does not look like a hardware problem but more like a wireless data usage is eating up batt

regardeless of wi-fi or 3g celular usage

and I can compare with a week ago doing the same things

before it was using 300-500Mb MONTHLY...now upto 100Mb DAILY

this could be the cause of heavy batery drain

why is this happening?

some sugestions in this forum are push services and location services

location trough GPS and 3gcelular data for time zone and assisting GPS

push trough mail (i did not have it so it might be not important) and iCloud

syncing for iCloud is permanent while apps selected are active (contacts/phone, calendar, reminder etc.)

for 2 days now instantly after using any of this apps I close them from recent bar

batery life more that doubled

also any data usage is looking to eat more batt than before (browsing, email etc.)

and all this on 3GS and able to compare it with the week before OS5

so 4s could not be the problem bu OS5 operating with data usage

for dealing with this could be

-case with suppl batt

-turn of time zone, location services, iCloud (help the batt but those are fsome eatures for the reason having the iPhone so...)

-OS update to have some sync options for iCloud like fetch (every 15/30/60 minutes or only while on wifi and pluged and locked-like for back-up) or manually sync

-a solution from the apple because they should now better

-back-up iTunes->back-up iCloud->factory reset->setup new phone->restore iCloud->restor iTunes (this seems to work for many but I did not have time to test it yet)

anyway contact apple as many as you can to stimulate them into having a official solution

hope I have been helpful