Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

cielak wrote:

 

As I mentioned before, I did all the necessary settings recommened for longer battery life.

 

I charged my phone last night and when I woke up the phone was at 100%. I unpluged it and it went down to 98%. Still can't figure out how this happens.

 

Anyway, here is my latest usuage. Can someone PLEASE tell me if if this is about normal or if you think I am loosing battery life faster then I should be.

 

Thank you.

 

Time since last full charge:

 

USAGE 4HOURS, 25MIN

STANDBY 9HOURS, 37 MIN.

 

I'm now at 33% battery life

 

I appreciate the feedback.

Does the USAGE agree with your actual experience? That is, do you remember using it for 4 1/2 hours? If the answer is Yes then you used the phone for 265 minutes ((4 x 60) +25) and the spec is 6 hours or 360 minutes on 3G. 265/360 = 0.74 or 74% 100% - 74% = 26%, so you are doing better than the phone's battery life spec if your usage was 3G.

Marc Posner wrote:

 

Lawrence Finch wrote:

 

Yes, true, but you cannot remove them by tuning off the phone, which is what the previous poster wanted to do.

 

Unless I am deeply mistaken, that's exactly what used to happen under iOS 4 on my iPad (the only device I had that was capable of running either iOS 4 or 5) - that cycling the power would in fact kill all running processes.

 

True, but would not remove their icons from the Recently Used ribbon and would not remove the foreground process from memory.

 

You certainly can remove apps from the task bar by pressing on the icon until they jiggle and then clicking on the red minus button. They nearly all (some of the native Apple apps excluded) disappear from the list of running processes shown in System Activity Monitor.

Yes, and this will kill the foreground task (which is idle) and the background task if there is one, UNLESS it is one of the built in apps.

Finally, and I realize some know quite a bit more than others, I have been told by several Apple employees that removing items from the task bar frees up memory by closing out the application. Since I've seen a number of low memory indications in the log files, this seemed like a prudent thing to do.

Yes, when you exit an app it remains in memory but is idle, so it doesn't use power, but it DOES continue to occupy memory. iOS cleans up memory ("garbage collection"), so normally this is not a problem, but if you have enough apps you CAN run out of working storage. When this happens you can get memory errors, and sometimes the phone will reboot spontaneously or shut down. So there are reasons to remove apps from the ribbon if you use a lot of different apps.

This is not a program that we have to give out.  I downloaded mine this am and will give them the info tomorrow. 

A interesting side note, my battery is better some days and worse others.

My usage is accurate. I have made a few calls and texts and also spend time today learning the phone's features so it has been in the usage mode a lot, not standby.

I am also at home so I have the WI-FI connected, not 3G. I know that can drain the battery too.

If you think this is pretty good for what I have stated, then I won't worry about it too much.

I just seems that my Blackberry battery lasted so much longer. Granted, I never got on the web or used any apps with it. That's probably why the battery lasted so long.

Thanks for your help.

I purchased the new 4s 4 days ago and also had appauling battery life.  15% in one hour without using it.  I exchanged it for a new 4s only to have the same issues.

My old iPhone 4 is still fully charged after idly sitting on the desk for 3 days.

Unless I hear from Apple in the next few days that there is going to be an update to fix the issue, I'll be returning it to Apple for a refund.  Great phone, lousy battery life.  These issues should not occur in a new phone.

One more thing.  It was mentioned to me by the apple employee that I spoke to that indeed the Facebook app might be one of the culprits.

As I said last night, everyone should take a deep breath.  Apple is aware of this issue and they are working on a fix. It will get taken care of.

Thanks for the informaiton.

I know that my old 3G used to run hot and essentially hang up. Rebooting it would both cool it down and reduce the hangs - so I always figured between that and the behavior I observed on the iPad (which didn't have either issue) that rebooting the devices killed all the user processes.

Watching this battery problem closely over the past few days (it has existed from day 1) has been interesting.

It is very inconsistent. Some days are better than others.

Today, I have done essentially nothing with the phone. I powered it on with a full charge roughly 9.5 hours ago. In contradiction to that, the usage stats show 3 hours, 38 minutes and a standy time of 8 hours, 26 minutes.

I estimate that there is no more than 90 minutes of usage on my part (I have no clue what Siri does in there all day, though).

I think the most interesting note is the usage first thing in the morning.

Starting with a 100% charge, I left home. I connected a bluetooth ear piece for my commute and played podcasts during the ~45 minute drive. With a location-based reminder set, I noted that the location arrow was both active when I left home and arrived at work.

I arrived at work with 99% of battery capacity remaining.

In the first 90 minutes at the office - having checked email once, connected to the office WiFi, having shut off the bluetooth headset and doing literally nothing else - the battery capacity dropped to 89%.

In the next 90 minutes, with the phone in standby sitting on my desk, the battery dropped 7%. In the 50 minutes following that, it dropped another 3%.

So, in 4 hours, having done nothing by check the time (and battery level) from the lock screen and review/delete on the order of 50 emails, the battery dropped from 99% to 79%.

In the (roughly) 5 hours since then, the capacity has dropped from 79% to 51% - although I was more active during this period, downloading System Activity Monitor, "completing" a couple of location-based reminders, deleting Facebook (which apparently had generated a number of error reports), closing apps, loading less than 10 web pages, and rebooting the phone a couple of times.

The phone was also completely powered off for a 35-minute period during this time.

The period of time that I was most active (at least in my mind), was during the commute - which exhibited the best battery performance.

In addition, since I know the WiFi will come into question, I had WiFi completely disabled at home last night and observered very similar battery drain issues.

Let me join the ranks of those concerned about battery life in the 4S. My wife has the 4 with the updated IOS and as of 8:19pm her phone is at 71% and my 4S is at 41%. Both phones were charged overnight to 100% and both were removed around the same time this AM. Not sure what is the issue but I have opened a case with Apple.  P>S> she talks more than I do on the phone . Hers shows 5 hrs, 30 minutes in usage and 16 hrs standby time. Mine shows 3 hours, 14 minutes of usage and 14 hrs of standby. I received one call and made one call all day, and noticed by 12 noon my battery life had dropped by 30%.

I have the same issues. I'll charge my phone overnight (8 hours), unplug it and it's only 98% charged. I  answered a text and it dropped to 90%.  I called Apple and they told me it was the apps in the background.  I have all notifications turned off and nothing being pushed to my phone. They told me to hard reset and if that didn't work do a full restore. I did and it worked for one day and it's back to draining to 33% in a few hours. I'll be going back to Apple for a new one.

You can add me to the list of users suffering lackluster battery performance.

I upgraded from an original iPhone 2G that was still yielding a solid 2 days+ of battery life with standard light usage (I am not on my phone all day). My 4S seems to get about a day and change if I ride it all the way out.

Since the phone is relatively new I am trying to ride out the battery through full cycles and all that good stuff.

- Notification Services: phone, messages and reminders

- Location Services: camera, instagram, maps, siri

- misc: ping is off, wifi off, network settings reset

I took 10-15min to go through all my settings etc to clarify a few items called out in this thread ... That use took my battery down 11%. With about 2 hours of usage since last nights charge, I am down to a total of 62% remaining. Using crude math based on this forum, the phone seems to get about 4-5 hours of use or a day and change of real-world use out of each charge.

Regardless, it seems to drain really really fast to the point where I feel like I am watching the % numbers tick. For now I am going to turn off the show battery percentage option to save battery

This is rediculous. The battery life is supposed to be the same (better in 3G) than the 4 but is so much worse. I am very upset with Apple. They made a modest upgrade and killed the battery. Can we get Steve back?

The biggest saving for me was turning off the Itunes wifi sync, i saw constant communication via my router logs from my iphone 4s to my computer regardless of it being on or off or my iphone plugged in. Now i am getting 7-8 hours of usage and about 2 days of standby time with exchange push on. To me it looks like any time my phone was connected to a wireless network it would ping for my computer.

My second iphone 4s is just as weak.  Tried everything in this forum to no avail.  Spoke with Apple just now, and the tech acknowledged this was a problem, and literally suggested I buy an iPhone 4.  When I said I would probably just get a Droid, he said, "I hear that!"

Overall I'm extremely pleased with everything on the 4s including the battery life.  I don't use the notifications all that much so almost all of them are set to off.  Since I've had my phone I've been on it non stop and the battery life is great except for...   I have a job location that I continually get "no service".  And while I'm at my location my battery tends to drain a lot quicker than normal.  This is where I found that my location services where going nuts.  So I shut them down.  I get a little bit better battery life while I'm working but not as if I was at my house.  I will say that there is a T-mobile tower right next to the "no service" location. 

Why am I  still getting email notifications for posts on here when I disabled them all?!