Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I would expect that a manufacturer which has sold 40,000,000,000 phones in the last 3 months, would have the wherewithall to figure out what a reasonably strong signal is.

EdiMC wrote:

 

But that is what the phone (supposedly) does...the thing is: What is a strong signal? What is a weak signal?

 

 

Agree, is a joke. I just bought one and if i do more than 1 hour of phone call i would not get untill the end of the day on a full battery. is just ridiculous. I am going to sell this cr.p and go back to using a £50 Nokia I bough when I lost my previous phone. It litteraly last a week normal usage before I need to recharge

On Feb 7, 2012 5:55 AM (in response to sbailey4)

susanaz wrote:

 

It Works!!!!

This process really improved my battery life, I was about to exchange my phone before I did it.

Now my battery last ALL DAY I even play games.

Thanks Davidch

What works? What process did you use?

You responded to sbailey4 but thanked Davidch (which I cannot find any posts from).

Jameson -  me, you and everyone here knows what does Strong and Weak mean. That's not the point. The point is: what does the phone have to do in order to choose? That implies constant searching, which leads to poor battery life...

pwest1a - Here we go again with the unrealistic expectations.

Smartphones (with moderate/heavy use) just WILL NOT LAST A WEEK!

They are not supposed to!

If that's what you value the most, you shouldn't have bought a Smartphone in the first place...

Chris CA - I think he followed the steps suggested by Davidch...

I think I found something that's working for me. I haven't read every post so apologies if this is a restatement.

I did all the recommended steps I've seen around forums, turned off diagnostic reporting, turned off bluetooth, turned off icloud, restricted ping, reset network settings, etc. etc. and nothing seemed to get the battery life to where I thought it should be with my usage... I was still losing about 1% of charge a minute of usage.

Then I disabled gmail note and calendar syncing. I don't know if the 4s communicates with the google servers differently, but once I copied all my notes and calendar events directly to my iphone instead of adding them to my gmail and google calendar account in the notes and ical apps (I didn't even realize I was doing this), that seems to have really helped.

I actually only realized that all of my notes were actually being stored and edited on google instead of the iphone directly when I deleted my gmail account and noticed all my notes were gone. When I added the account back, there they were again!

You can disable gmail notes and calendars by going to settings, mail, and then selecting the gmail account and moving the sliders to off.

This combined with turning off location services unless I need them REALLY extends the battery life like crazy... but even with location services on my battery life is seemingly at least doubled so far.

Thats what I am thinking too. If you know you are in a weak area (some are always at home or work for example) then the toggle will help and save all the polling and trying to decide and switch back and forth.  I dunno I an in NC on Verizon and always have strong 3G and we are CDMA so wont make much difference to me anyways . Plus I dont really have any battery issue to speak of.

Davidch has another thread here with a reset procedure.  You can click on her reply  to me and see the orig post I sent. Also you can find the process here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3484755

Chris CA wrote:

 

 

On Feb 7, 2012 5:55 AM (in response to sbailey4)

susanaz wrote:

 

It Works!!!!

This process really improved my battery life, I was about to exchange my phone before I did it.

Now my battery last ALL DAY I even play games.

 

Thanks Davidch

 

What works? What process did you use?

You responded to sbailey4 but thanked Davidch (which I cannot find any posts from).

OK well they probably can, however, once again the phone will have to poll and check constantly to see what to switch to and probably go back and forth as signal changes (like it does now) I would think. It appears folks who had older iPhones (from orig to 4) and always had this feature simply want it back because it did help them apparently. Dont seem anyone ever had issue with having that as an option. Now that Apple is adding it back most are very happy, some apparently are fussing that "it isnt a fix".  Oh well, whatdaya do.

Maybe modify their marketing such that " Most amazing phone yet, However If you dont want to plug in but once a week, or change any settings/options, buy something else",  Thanks Apple Marketing Dept.

Jameson! wrote:

 

I would expect that a manufacturer which has sold 40,000,000,000 phones in the last 3 months, would have the wherewithall to figure out what a reasonably strong signal is.

EdiMC wrote:

 

But that is what the phone (supposedly) does...the thing is: What is a strong signal? What is a weak signal?

 

 

we are talking about not lasting a day...there again people talking without reading...

There is no problem for the phone to select the strongest wireless signal, 2G or 3G. Apparently all mobile phones do this all the time. This is common knowledge and is available to everyone.

However, iPhone is not just some mobile phone, it is smartphone. The difference is, that the 'normal' mobile phone only cares about the voice channel and might from time to time need to look for data connection when you decide to do something more extraordinary with it, like use it as wireless modem etc.

The smartphone and especially the iPhone is designed to use an Internet connection at all times. If can of course work as normal mobile phone -- just switch off Cellular Data!

The problem is really with the mobile operators. They do claim, for few years already 'perfect coverage' and they also claim that 'all their networks are 3G' -- while in reality this is rarely so. You may have perfect 3G radio signal, but since 3G is sort of mini-Internet, you may have very congested network. The voice may go trough, because it is typicallt highly prioritized in these networks, but data may not. And in many cases your phone will try repeatedly to send the same data packet.

Since any data transmission on your mobile phone consumes a lot of power, the battery will drain faster, if you are connected to a 'bad' network.

The 2G networks are different by design. They are more 'telecom' like, in that each connection is separate and when you connect, virtually nobody uses 'your' circuit. Ok, they may have some data congestion in the pipes, but this is extremely rare these days, because the backbone is usually fiber and much much faster than the wireless part.

So there may be many situations, where you may have better 3G *signal* than 2G, but worse 3G *network* than 2G. In these cases, the ability to switch off 3G will make your experience actually better, although your bandwidth will be limited to about 200 Kbit (EDGE) -- but it may be much more stable over time and definitely requiring less power from your device to operate.

This is true for any make mobile phone. Most phones from other manufacturers actually have much worse 2G/3G battery drain ratio. If you use your iPhone primary as mobile phone and use Internet on WiFi -- by all means, switch to 2G when iOS 5.1 becomes available.

Mine is currently at 59% after 1 day 13 hours standby and 3 hours 1 minute usage. It depends mostly on your settings. What are yours?

Also, if your iPhone 4S is brand new, it may take at least 10 full charges before your battery reaches full capacity. Mine is on it's 4th or 5th charge and each next time it lasts longer.

I deleted the Skype app from my iPhone4S then restarted it and that did the trick for me. Was losing 10% an hour in standby mode this week and after deleting the app am back to maybe 1% an hour. May not work for everyone but thought I would let you know.

jasonsc wrote:

 

I deleted the Skype app from my iPhone4S then restarted it and that did the trick for me.

Was this battery drain happening even if Skype wasn't open on your iPhone??

Hey iphone's user, before i am also having this problem with my iphone 4s! It is the solfware problem i think! now i have a better of batterylife! If u want it, go to google and search < Solution for ios 5.0.1 batterylife >

I heard after 10 full cycle charges..... don't know if that is true as I have not gotten the 4S yet.... don't know if I want one now after hearing all these battery issues... YIKES!!!