Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

it sounds like Apple is messing with some server settings...

I have had similar problems, and I would like to say that I may have a solution mentioned in the link below:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/iphoneios-5-battery-saver-tips/15712

The thing that worked for me is to double tap home, which showed almost all of my apps were running in the background. I then tapped and held an app until the little minus symbol appeared and closed all the apps except for phone, reminders, messages, mail, and safari. This has drastically cut down on the battery drainange. I will next try to add one app at a time in the background to observe for any increase in drainage.

Also, I've made the brightness around 20%.

I was having the same issues as everyone else with my 4s battery...reading through this forum and some others, I took some steps that seemed to help. I'm not sure which did it, but threw everything at it with the hope that something would work.

I was getting similar bad battery life--dead after half a day of average use, draining 1% idle every 5 minutes or so, etc. Now, the thing can sit idle for an hour without losing any battery percentage, and battery performance seems to be greatly improved. Ie, I can play a few rounds of Words with Friends, check email, send a few SMS and not have battery go down.

This is what I did--combination of tips I've read for optimizing battery life:

- Battery conditioning: Drained battery to dead, then did full wall charge before unplugging

- Deleted iCloud account, then signed back in to get my calendars/contacts/etc back

- Reset network settings (this means you have to re-enter wifi passwords)

- Turned off Siri "Raise to speak"

- Turn off automatic reporting and local iAds in location services

     - Turn off location services for apps you don't need them for (ie, I don't care if IMDB knows where I am)

- Turn off bluetooth when not in use (a pain to turn back on when i get in my car, but oh well)

Seems a little overboard that you have to go through all of this to experience decent battery life...will keep an eye on it!

Best post yet, thanks for the extensive testing and info!

Listen guys, I have found the solution and it works.

Firstly I had the worse battery problem ever I had to charge it 5 times yesterday, until I done extensive test and then something so simple I overlooked.

Firstly if like I backed up their iPhone 4 and then got their new iPhone 4s and restored from iCloud your battery will always drain. I bet you any money, and if you did this I bet you any money I have the solution.

Since doing what I did at 7am this morning I had 100% charge at 12pm I had 84% charge after using a fair bit 1 hour online and texts and emails. As I'm writing this message I have 34% at almost 9pm.

The solution is forget all your stuff you had on your old phone and start from scratch just use iCloud to back up the following: Contacts, Notes and photos and that is it no more.

Then restore your phone and set up as new iPhone 4S, this sorted my problem and also the speed was amazing.

My conclusion is, is that the iCloud has corrupted your back up and when you download and restore from the cloud you are asking your new phone to act like and iPhone 4. This will cause internal CPU loops and eternal send and receive messages in the background that cains your battery. Download all your apps from the app store and start all over again. Remember the old way of restoring. If you plugged in your iPhone 4 and asked it to restore on an iPhone you get a message saying that it is incompatible well the same applies from iCloud back up. You are asking your spanking new 4s to match your iPhone 4. Try it now and thank me when you are done.

if you are restoring from a previous iPhone backup then most likely this is an issue with the email accounts. I had the same thing happen when i moved from the 3GS to the 4 and now again from the 4 to the 4S. You need to delete your email accounts (all of them) and re-add. simple fix. You don't need to turn off everything (Bluetooth, WIFI, etc, etc.) what good would the phone be then.

at this point all should be right with the world. YMMV.....

good luck!

- sean

I was also seeing horible battery life problems and I fixed it by just turning off iCloud "Documents & Data".  Can other people confirm that turning off "Documents & Data" in iCloud settings on the iPhone fixes your battery life too?

You might have to power off the phone after turning off "Documents & Data", and then turn the phone back on to fully fix the issue.

Message was edited by: Snoop Dogg

I just got back from the apple store. I told them that I was having unacceptable battery life, and that I wanted to try exchanging the phone. The employee took a look and decided it must be because I had "too many apps on the phone." I had 4 (four) [YES, FOUR!] apps installed at the time, 3 of which had notifications turned on. Give me a break. The genius bar employees need to stop treating people like theyre idiots, especially since I clearly explained to him the performance I got on my iphone 4 and that I knew how to properly use my device.

We'll see how this replacement fares. If its still bad, and not fixed with software updates by the time my return period is nearly over, I'm going back to my iphone 4.

Had the same issue with signal with Verizon. For some reason, at certain locations, verizon has weak signal and begins to roam or continuously looks for coverage which uses up a lot of battery life.

For example:  working at the hospital emergency room. There are 3 different wings in the ER where I work. When I am assigned to "B" wing, my phone uses up my battery life by the end of my 12 hour shift. I noticed a low signal strength on my attenna bars. However, when assigned to A or C wing, my battery lasts the whole shift.

It may be your location or signal strength that differs from others that don't have the same issue. Hope that helps.

Alas, I just got off the phone with Verizon to inquire about the procedure for returning my phone. As disappointed as I am, there is at least a consolation in the fact that they'll just return my money and reset my contract as if it never happened to allow me time to decide which Android phone I'm going to get.

I jumped into this thread way back in the page 6 or 7 days, and I've been following the progress religiously every since. Wow, we're all the way to page 69 now. The time has flown. It seems like it was only last week ... **** it WAS only last week. Well, at any rate, my story is like many others posting here, and apparently very different than many others. My new 4S -- my first iPhone ever -- arrived on launch day and out of the box could barely make it through a 10 hr day on a full charge. The discharge rate was rediculous on stand-by and even worse when in use. (by "in use" I mean light surfing, texting, listening to podcasts, messing with settings, etc.) But thanks to the quite respectable combined efforts of people posting to this thread, I have managed to get the phone to a point where it discharges at around 1% to 2% per hour on Standby, and affords me around 3 to 5 hours of "use" -- light use with few to none talk minutes. And that is with important push notifications, iCloud, Photostream, Siri, location services, and Exchange calendar/email/contacts sync'ing ON. The last thing I tried was going back to turning Wifi, the Exchange syncing, and push notifications OFF, and that seemed to bring the Standby rate down to 1%/hr, but did nothing to improve "in use" stamina. FWIW, the above was with a scant few mainstream 3rd party apps that I worked up to slowly.

IMHO, the iPhone 4S is a work of art both technically and asthetically. I think Siri IS in fact on track to be a killer app. It is true that there are some features and characteristics of Android phones I've been missing, but there is so much I loved about the iPhone that the trade-off was well worth it. I could write several pages on what I like about the iPhone. I have an iMac, and I plan to get an iPad eventually, so an iOS phone for me just makes sense.

So now I have less than 48 hours to return the iPhone and bide my time with my old Droid ... or not. What I've concluded is this:

• My iPhone is usable.
• It's not that hard to make sure I start the day with a full charge.
• I usually have a charger in the car if it needs a bump up.
• I like push notifications and location services but I don't NEED all of them.
• It's not really that difficult to pay more attention and tailor my usage habits to conserve energy.
• I've become very fond of my iPhone 4S, but "usable" is not good enough. Especially not for an Apple product.
• Because Apple has not publicly acknowledge this problem and given consumers any reassurrance that they WILL make this right one way or another, I'm not going to let my return window close on nothing but an assumption that an iOS update come along soon to fix it.

The bottom line is that I cannot see myself living with a two-year contract on a $400 phone that requires interminable battery baby-sitting when I have other options. And that is truly a shame, because if not for the battery issue, the iPhone 4S would truly be a great phone for a lot of people, myself included.

So by this time tomorrow I'll be back to my nasty old slow as plate techtonics shattered glass Droid and crying in my beer over my lost love, Siri. The Verizon phone rep I spoke with told me that "yes, the Droid Razr will be a global phone", which is highly desirable to me, but I'm skeptical that he has his facts straight based on what I'm seeing in the "press". I'll probably end up with a Razr and then usurp my daughter's upgrade to get an iPhone 5 whenever that day comes.

For all of you that have but so much effort into solving this problem and sharing your experiences with the rest of us, I thank you sincerely.

Good luck and May The Force Be With You

ps: I'm REALLY going to miss the camera! It truly did live up to Apple's claims.

pps: I'm going to miss seamless iTunes integration and iMessage and Photostream ... and the Reminder app with iCloud ROCKS!

ppps: Oh Siri what have I done?

Ok guys obviously turning off some memory intensive and network intensive apps/processes are gonna solve battery issues.  I think the underlying problem is that we were not given enough battery power to be able to run all the new processes and services given to us with iOS5. By turning them off, it fixes. There are WAY TOO MANY people having problems for this just to be some error or loop. Yeah, maybe it is software and maybe apple can tweak ios5 to run more efficiently down the line with an update, but how drastically can they change this? We were quoted identical battery usage times with the 4s when compared to the 4. Many of us are getting slightly worse... No surprise to me at all. It's probably going to be like this and a software update may fix it by a little bit. Turning off processes and services that we SHOULD be able to use without a problem should not be the solution here. This is why we have iPhones. This is why apple is the "best." They don't make idiot mistakes like this very often. We'll see what they say in the next few weeks... No tweak is going to fix anything by some unbelievable amount in my opinion. I just pulled my phone off charge 25 min ago and I'm at 92%. I believe we were not given enough battery power as compared to previous iPhones/iOS versions in order to use this phone without draining the battery. I may be wrong to some degree though and once again this is just my opinion. I tend to look at things from a different perspective anyway.

I have experimented with my iPhone 4s - and the issue remains - POOR BATTERY LIFE.  It seems with minimal use I have to charge my phone every 2 days.  My wife and I purchased at the same time a plain iPhone 4 - and her battery life is just as good as our iPads. 

Apple, please help with this problem....

Thank you

It's great to see your confidence, micky But this is my first iPhone ever and having same battery problem. How do you explain then?

I think many of us who are upgrading from an iphone 4 have found that there is not just a marginal difference between this and our old phones. I'd say, for me at least, I'm getting about HALF the battery life of my iphone 4, if not less. Yes, if the battery lasted 10% shorter due to the new features I wouldn't mind, but to be so far off from the quoted usage times is completely unacceptable.

Hi all,

I have never had an apple product in my life and the iPhone 4s is my first apple product.  When I first got the phone, it had great battery life.  After setting up my email account (1 account) and my iCloud account and adding apps (21 of them), my battery life went to **** like the rest of you.  like my past device (blackberry) I decided to do a complete wipe and start from new.  After re-setting up my email account and iCloud, it automatically pushed my backed-up apps and contacts etc... back to my "newly" setup iPhone.  I completely charged to 100% at approximately 10pm last night, unplugged and as of now (4:30pm) it's showing I still have 55% battery left.  I believe that restoring and "starting from new" did the trick.  I'm pretty sure that if I didn't resotre, I'd be at maybe 10-20% battery at this time of day.  Anyways, just wanted to let everyone know that this has worked for me so far and hope that it can help others.