Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Getting the same issue with an iPhone 4S bought in France and received last Friday AM. This seems to be linked to my 4S losing its connection to the mobile phone network (not talking 3G which I disabled for testing with no changes at all). When this happens while I am awake (and if I notice it) then I try to reconnect manually to the mobile phone network but cannot. I either get a message stating that network isn't available or see the 4S searching for the network I selected indefinitely. The only solution I found to get back connected is to switch the device off then back on again - only this clears the problem. When this happens overnight then the battery gets flat.....

To add to this my WIFI network parameters seem to disappear! I am connecting to my home (WPA2) and corporate (WPA2 Enterprise) networks. I just cleared all network settings again this morning using the restore network parameters facility and remained connected for less than 10 minutes to my Corporate network after which time 4S told me that it needed my password again but did not connect when password was reentered!

To make things clear I also own an iPhone 4 running iOS 4.3.2 and did not get any such issues with it. I am getting my 4S swapped at the Geneva Apple Store tonight but I am unsure that this will make any difference ...

I have been asked by Apple Genius to do a full restore and not restore my original back up to see if this helps.

I mentioned to the Genius I spoke to that some people in this forum had been told by other Apple Genius's that Apple is aware of this problem.  His reply is that they had not been made aware of the issue at all. 

We will see if this restore to a clean state will help.......

I made at least 4 full restores since Friday and this changed nothing at al.....

One of the main things people are talking about here to save battery is switching off the sending of diagnostic reports to Apple..

Is that not a bit of a false economy -- The reports from people with a battery problem might actually be useful to fixing the problem??

Maybe if everybody in this thread actually turned that on again for a couple of days Apple would have enough real data (instead of our guess work) to diagnose the issue??

I am not (and never was) sending any diags to Apple still my battery gets flat and my 4S disconnects from the mobile phone and WIFI networks.

I have exactly the same issue. The two are likely related. It suddenly drops a strong wifi or 3g signal (despite indicating full strength). If you go into and then out of airplane mode it immediately picks up the signal again.

However, if you don't do this you can watch the battery drain away.

Any word from Apple on this?

Frankly ridiculous, it has taken them 18 months to make this phone/software and I can't use it for a whole day without being concerned I may run out of battery when I need it.

Nothing has worked so far.

Another 4s User experiencing fast drain.

This morning, I noticed my battery was draining extremely fast.

I did a hard reset, at 95%, when the phone restarted the indicator was back upto 99%. Very frustrating.

I'm having the same issue, it *****. My galaxy s has been on standby for 3 days and is only down to 70%, the iPhone 4s would have died in under 2 days of no use!

I don't know if the battery problem has anything to do with Exchange Server.

I have an AOL, POP3 and Gmail account (none Exchange) and I have been experiencing the battery problems.

I'm totally discouraged. I got this new iphone 4s last week-end, and i'm amazed by the battery life.....After a lot of researches on the net, i found out all the tricks everybody gives, to make the battery last longer...You know, turn off this and that, lower this and that, no push notifications, no localization, lower the brightness, etc...I did everything, and it did go a BIT better....But not much. For a day of work, with almost no use but in my lunch time a bit of facebook/farmville, no call no messages,  NOTHING else, If i unplugged it at 5h30 at 100%, when i come back home, around 5h30, it's below 10% for sure. Yesterday night, I called the apple customer service, he told me to do those same things that I already did, and then he told me to do a restore. Here's the point: I'm not sure i did the right thing...So what I did is I saved my stuffs on itunes like the guy told me, then i restored it. but then i restored again from the backup, because i wanted my appllications back, but it also sounds stupid to me because if i restore from the back-up, i might bring back the problem, no? So anyway, I did that, and while my iphone was plugged in the computer, it charged until 100%. Around 9h P.m , I unplugged it, and i browsed a bit on the apple store for a while...It went down only to 96%, witch is still bad for the time i was on, but still better than the pasts few days, so i thought maybe it fixed the problem....I crossed my fingers, hoping everything was finally ok, and i went to bed without charging it again. This morning, at 5h45, i looked at it, and it was 91%. I thought it was good. Then, i went on facebook for about an hour, and did nothing else. It went down to 69%. Now it's only 7h45 and it's 67%...Maybe i didnt do the restoring good, I don't know....Iphone is totally new for me, i didn't even have a smartphone before....But ...I see i'm not the only one having problems....

Can you help me and tell me a bit more about the restore? Did I do the right thing or not?? Cuz if I did wrong, i want to do it again the right way, so after i can maybe go to an apple store to test the battery or something...

Thanks.

I truly agree that 4s battery life is worse. With 4,light usage like reading news, fetch email every hour and Play some games, the battery can last 1.5days. Now on 4s it even cannot last 24hours. On the first severy days I thought it was my problem as I played around Siri a lot. But recently I switched off Siri, and make all app settings as on 4 and disable unnecessary notifications and location services.  I tried with 100% charge, however the battery went down by 20% just in 2 hours with some news reading and musics.

Today a bit heavy use in the evening, I fully charged at 5:30pm Sydney time in my office, now 10:48pm , idouse only 34% remaining.

The only thing I do in the past 5 hours is music and chat with friends on an app.

I agree, the battery life isn't great, but my iPhone 4s's battery life is far better than some peoples.

I had music playing through headphones on my iPhone for 5 hours straight, used it for a few texts, used maps and I haven't disabled any settings, (I have stopped a few push notifications from certain apps) and I lost maybe 10% for the whole journey? That's not so bad considering what I was doing although it could definatley be improved.

When connected to wi-fi though, my battery life is much much shorter. In 7 hours my battery was red. So it lasted around 14 hours, 5 of which were used for constant music + messages, and a good deal of the other 7 hours used for messaging and brousing + youtube.

Same issues here. Yesterday my phone battery dropped from a 100% to 0% without heavy use (siri off, icloud off, push for most apps off) in 14 hours. Where it was in standby mode most of the time (about 12 hours).

I tried all the tips and tricks (resetting network, losing exhange etc.). Nothing seemed to work.

I switched the phone off last night. Charged it in its original charger. Got rid of exchange and did a benchmark this morning (without really using it)

07:30 - 100%

09:00 - 93%

10:00 - 88%

11:00 - 82%

Just too much with everything off (no email etc.).

Just now I did the restore as a new phone. It is connected to wifi and 3G, but iCloud off, Siri off and nothing else configured.

12:00 - 100%

13:10 - 100%

That is more like it.

Will setup my apps and stuff one by one to figure out what the problem is.

Will update this post with more info once I find it.

I think there is a loose correlation between the 3G radio/wifi dropping in and out of data connection (despite "receiving" signal strength being displayed as strong) and the battery death.  It's almost like it gets caught spinning in the background and nothing but a complete reboot of the 3G radio (either via airplane cycling or restart) sets it right again.  However, I've noticed this to be very location specific for me.  Something is most definitely not right, but I'd be hard pressed to point an immediate finger at what is wrong, just that I know the 5 people I know who got 4S's are all having the same issue, while someone who has the 4 is having "similar" problems, just not to the same extent.  I'm hoping for a bug patch/rev to clear this up in the future.  I don't think that Apple is going to just ignore the problem.

For those saying, you are in the minority, I'd like to provide a small bit of perspective.  If Apple sold 5 million of these phones and for the sake of math, lets say 1% of the users are having issues; that is 50,000 customers effected, and by the age old statement they are likely to tell 10 people about their problem that is 550,000 people who have a more negative outlook on Apple today than they may have had yesterday.  By any company's principles, this is not a good thing, and things like this have a tendency to snowball.