Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I'm sure this has been written loads....

just turn off iCloud untill Apple update IOS.

There's no way this is a *single* issue. I did a full iCloud restore, turned off push mail, turned off ping, turned off time zone support, and followed the Macworld troubleshooting guide, and battery life is better, but still worse than my iPhone 4, and sporadically still heats up and is totally terrible.

I pulled it off the charger this morning at 7:10am, it dropped instantly from 100% to 99%, and then I let it sit there untouched for 1 hour. I came back at 8:10 and it was at 87%. It's now 11:31 and it's at 76%, and I've used it for a few minutes, so its obviously not linear. Usage shows 1:49 which is off by probably an hour and a half.

I had the 3GS push mail issue, I'm hoping Apple releases a fix for this as well. I'm surprised this hasn't been picked up by the media yet.

Lastly, I've noticed many of the settings menus require "resets" before they show all their contents. I had to reset network settings before my "personal hotspot" showed up, and yesterday I had to turn iMessage on/off before it would show my caller-id and email options. Normally not something I'd notice, but being in the settings so much over the last couple weeks makes one sensitive to these issues. Thought I'd mention it in case it was related...

My battery life was horrible till I used this method.  http://bit.ly/w0FZVm I am now at 44% charge after nearly 48 hours of run time. That is pretty good.

I haven't read this monstronsity of a thread but wanted to add yet another phone to the sucky battery life after updating!  I have an iPhone 4 and my husband has a 3G.

I've got iCloud turned off except for Find My Phone, turned off the Time Zone thing and the Diagnostic Data report to Apple.  I'm trying to leave everything as it as it was before the update.  Mail is fetched manually and I've turned off the Stocks and Weather widgets as I don't need them.

Tried most of the suggestions like resetting network connections, deleting and re-adding email accounts (don't use Exchange), etc.  No change.

I tried a backup (not to iCloud, just iTunes and my pc), restore and reinstall of the update.  No change.

Put the Flashlight on my phone and ran it down till the phone turned itself off.  The battery did hold a bit better, but only until I started using it!  I wanted to run the battery down again last night, but didn't get to.

Battery is already going down, down, down.  It's been on almost 5 hours and all I've done is some Facebooking, and Words/Hanging w/Friends, and a couple of texts and it's already down to 84%.

My husband got his 3G just before the update and his battery life is noticebly worse as well even though he doesn't use his like I do.  He only uses Wi-Fi, doesn't want to pay for data anything (right now, anyway lol). 

Be glad when Apple fixes this issue!

Ok, so this is CRAZY.  Me and a few guys at work have iPhone 4Ses, and all of us had battery problems last week.  We have all tried many of the "tricks" posted here that claim to improve battery life.  Last weekend, we ALL noticed signficantly better battery life (?).  Ok, so that's weird, maybe the problem fixed itself.  I proceeded to turn ALL of the supposedly power-sucking options back on, and still had "reasonable" battery life for the next 4 days.  Reasonable meaning I could casually use my phone all day and when I went to bed the battery still read 60% remaining.

TODAY, however, when I unplugged my phone from the charger the battery meter immediately dropped to 98%.  After my 15 minute walk to work the battery was at 94%.  The CRAZY part is that all the other guys at work are back to crappy battery life as well today.  This seems to be something server related--so strange!  Hopefully it will fix itself soon again or be addressed in a OS update.

Count me in for the same battery problems on my 64GB 4S.  Battery life on this thing is abysmal and it willl be returned if Apple can't solve this by the time my return window is up.  I contemplated swapping it out at the Apple store, but it doesn't look like that's solving the problem for people on this forum...  

I've owned every iPhone since the original one and battery life has always been stellar.  I rarely needed to charge my phones during the day, as it lasts a full day after charging it overnight.  With my 4S, it drops from 100% at 7AM to about 20% by noon, and that's with very moderate use.  Ridiculous.  I've tried turning off all of the iCloud setting, reducing the location services and did a network reset.  If any of that helped, it was a very minimal improvement.

I strongly believe this is an iOS5 issue rather than something specific to the 4S hardware.  The reason being, I gave my old iPhone 4 to my wife and she then restored it from her backup and upgraded to iOS5.  She's now complaining of bad battery life on the iPhone 4!   There's gotta be something wrong with iOS5.

Apple, please fix ASAP or this phone is getting returned and I'm going to start exploring Android devices.  Battery life on them might not be much better than what I'm dealing with now, but at least it'll be something new and fun to explore.

I agree- I think this is related to how the phone is talking to the server, and they must be tweaking things.

gmaass wrote:

 

I agree- I think this is related to how the phone is talking to the server, and they must be tweaking things.

What server?

We have (3) 16gb black 4gs phones that we picked up on the 14th, and are used on AT&T. All three have had reduced battery life issues from day one. I have been following this thread and doing everything that has been suggested. The only thing that helped was to remove our Yahoo email and calenders. What I noticed was that when you would access yahoo email the phone seamed to have a hard time connecting, and it took a long time to update email. When I opened calendar, it never updated with my Yahoo calendar, the progress wheel at the top just kept spinning. This problem occured both on 3G and wifi. After I would access these programs my battery would drop like a rock until i reset the phone to break whatever loop it was caught in. So for now we are not using our email accounts on the phones.

I recall having a similar problem with battery life on my 3g, which was fixed with an update to the os from Apple. We never had any problems with our 3gs battery life until I installed ios5. The next day my battery dropped like a rock, but then it seemed to work OK after that, go figure. I only tried ios5 on my 3gs for a couple days, then we traded them in for the 4gs. The way things are going that may not have been such a good trade. Keep smiling everyone, Apple will find a solution.

Please try this and let me know if it works for you. Go to location services, system services, and turn off automatic time zone setting. Leave everything else on the phone switched on. It seems to be the one thing that has solved the battery problem in mine and 2 friend's phones. I turned it off on Monday and haven't had to put the phone on charge for the past 33 hours and still have 41% charge left. To test it out, I just turned the setting back on and the battery started to drop rapidly, turned it back off and it's fine again.

Try it and see.

From October 17th:  (I just did this - and my battery has not dropped a single percent in the past 2 hours!!)

Hi everyone, I had the exact same problem, and following the below steps has solved my problems. My 4S battery life is now amazing (i.e. in my case, the email account was the issues). Here is a quick list of things to try:

• Reset Network Settings: Tap on “Settings” > Reset > Reset Network Settings
• Disable Bluetooth: Settings > General > Bluetooth > “OFF”
• Disable unwated Notifications & apps: Settings > Notifications > Turn OFF for anything you don’t need
• Disable Location Service: Settings > Location Services > Disable selectively for services you don’t use
• Disable Timezone Adjustment: Tap on “Settings” > “Location Services” > ‘System Services’ > Setting Time Zone to OFF
• Disable Ping: Settings > General > Restrictions > Enable Restrictions > Ping > OFF
• Disable Diagnostic & Usage Reports: Tap on “Settings” > General > About > Diagnostic & Usage > Don’t Send
• Disable Email accounts by heading to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Account Name > Delete Account. Once done, reset network settings (the first tip up there) then reboot your device and re-add your accounts back from Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Add Account.

This thread is getting quite long so hopefully I am not reproducing anything here. Like all of you I experianced dreadful battery life with my new 4s.  Over this past weekend I noticed that my phone spontaniously started having MUCH better battery life.  Then again on Monday my battery life turned horrible again.  Later when getting a new meeting invite/notification (I have an Exchange email/calendar ActiveSync account) I noticed my drop down calender notifications were flickering.  I went ahead and accepted my new meeting and then noticed the flickering stopped.  Thinking I might be onto something I installed iStat and waited for a new meeting invite (unfortunately I get a lot). Once I got an invite and verified the notification flickering started I looked at the load on my iPhone via iStat and it was ~2.60 which is pretty high.  I went into Settings->Notifications and turned off "Notification Center" for the calender.  The load then dropped to between 1.40 an 0.40 which was quite significant.  As of this morning with normal use my battery is at 84% after being unplugged for about 4 hours which is a big improvement.  My theory is that unaccepted meeting invites are causing the calendar notification to spin into overdrive.  Removing Calendars from Notification Center seems to have helped a lot without disabling too many features I depend on.

Your mileage may vary.

I FIXED MY BATTERY ISSUE.

No thanks to apple support... and thanks to those who posted here....I followed these instructions and it worked.

Setting --> General --->  Reset --->  "RESET NETWORK SETTING"

Now my battery went from fully charged to 81% in 15 hours.

Before that I tried all sorts of stuff and also found the phone getting hot.  Now its back to what I think is normal.

UPDATE: My battery life has improved! I reset my network settings and turned off WiFi (unless I am somewhere where I know for sure I can use it). I still have the cloud on as well as bluetooth. I even turned ON the option of sending the diagnostics and usage to Apple (figured they should see what it is going on). Hope this helps.

I just Reset Network Setting and my battery was at 99% and after resetting it actually went back up to 100%. Bizarre but now I am hopeful!