Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

One thing that I noticed but forgot to say in my earlier posts is that should your 4S be close to any speakers then you will notice the "mobile phone connection noise pattern" at regular and extremely short time intervals, sometimes continuously. This in itself may tend to show that there really is an issue with the way mobile phone network connectivity is kept alive on the 4S. And I have also lost connectivity to my WPA2 Enterprise network for the 4th time today - I will not clear network settings and recreate as my Phone 4S will be swapped for a new one in a few hours time.

Still I strongly believe that I will face the same issues then....... If I were to bet any money then I would go for iOS 5 as favorite option, then 4S antennas. Reasons for this order is that I have seen posts of people who upgraded their iPhone 4 to iOS 5 and got into the same battery life issues.

I do have a 4 but kept it running iOS 4.3.2. And I have no intention to upgrade it to iOS 5. In fact it may return to service tonight.

I too beleive there is some correlation between droppgin signal and the battery drain/heating up/ I noticed my phone kept loosing all reception and entering searching mode, despite someone elses phone having full signal. when it did connect it was to a 2g network rather than the 3g which was availible. Following this the phone got hot and went from 100% to 0 in about 4 hours !. It had been working fine for about a week prior to this

Ok update. So far, since I put the Iphone on my desk at 7h30, I didn't touch it, but to press the home button to see the battery %, and it only lost 2%. It's now 8h45.

I have some questions.

1. What is considered like light, medium or heavy usage? Is using facebook a heavy usage? I lost 22 % in an hour because i was on facebook...(Collecting some gifts on the feed for farmville, haha!) I can'T believe this is normal...

2. Did I restore correctly? -> https://discussions.apple.com/message/16542065#16542065

3.  What is the email exchange? Some people says that deleting that may resolve the problem. Does it means to delete any email accounts on the iphone?

4. What do you think: Is it a hardware problem, a batch of bad phone batteries, or is it something you think can be resolved with a software update ?

5. I'm sorry to ask for so much. I'ts so new, and a bit confusing for me...(and English is not my first language also...)

6. Thank you VERY much.

I restored the 4s to factory setting as requested by Apple Genius.  Still the battery issues remain.  I have lost 22% batter in 2 hours, and I have lost my patience with this.  I am taking the 4s back for a full refund tomorrow.  I purchased a new smart phone.  I did not pay for a Beta version of the phone, nor to be a tester of the phone.  I certainly did not sign up for this!

I have restored my phone 3 times now, no difference.  I have everything turned off that has been suggested in this forum, reset emails, turned of push notifications, locations services are on for a couple of apps.  Time zone is off, ping is off.  I constantly turn off unused apps.  I got disgusted enough yesterday that I called Sprint.  I had already done everything they suggested.  They gave me the location of the nearest Apple store.  I was traveling, and it turns out I was only 3 minutes away.  I got an appointment with a genius.  He went through the settings on my phone, all were correct.  He said Apple is aware of the issue and will release a fix.  I told him that I had 2 more days to decide if I was keeping this phone or not.  I also told him that when I pay $400 for a phone, it should be perfect, and not have these types of issues.  I called Sprint back and asked my options.  I could exchange the phone and get another one, just to take a chance that the next phone would be as bad or worse.  Once I crossed that bridge, I was stuck with the phone.  I could choose another phone, or just return this phone, get my money back and reset my upgrade status.  The phone is headed back.  This does sadden me, as I really like the phone and have waited for 4 long years to have one, but the battery really needs to last longer.

I would love to know how many phones are headed back to their respective carriers this week.

Weird. Got my new phone two days ago, and couldn't reproduce the SIM Pin issue that plagued the old one.

Battery drains pretty fast still, but NOT like 50% in 8h like the old one. So I'd assume there are two problems:

1) Purely software related

2) Hard/Software related. My SIM card isn't in a perfect shape, maybe the 4S has more trouble reading it. And thus there is some software interference that causes the huge drain.

64gb 4s with EVERYTHING ON.   Exchange for my work email, gmail and yahoo mail accounts as well.   Connected through wifi both home and at the office.   One hour of commuting on 3G so far today.

Unplugged at 5:30am, checked email, weather, news, did an app update (5 apps downloaded via wifi).  

It's now nearly 9:30 here and after 4 hiurs I'm at 93% remaining.  

I'm a rare happy user so far...........   ;-)

Same hardware as yours but nearly everything OFF apart from email and battery discharges fast. If I'd try the same usage as yours then phone would stop far before the end of what you described. And also loosing WPA2 Enterprise network connection parameters.

Getting it changed to a new 4S soon - will see if this works.

Like ironhead3fan says, "He said Apple is aware of the issue and will release a fix", but do you really think that it is simply some software iOS bug that can be "fixed" seemlessly? Like as if an intern wrote a wrong line of code "whoops"

I have had moderate success with closing out my apps (double click on home button, etc.) charged it yesterday at noon. It's 9 AM and it still has 60%. Usuage was minimal but SO much better than before I shut everything off. Maybe there is software that will automatically close the high usage apps without us having to do it ourselves? I still love the phone and have faith that Apple will figure it out. Not sure WHICH apps are the big energy suckers but suspect maps and find my phone?

I did a complete factory restore and setup as a new phone (restoring off of my backup brings the problem back immediately), loaded some apps back on, setup my exchange, haven't made any concessions to my normal settings, and already my 3G and wifi reception issues seem cleared up.  I'll keep an eye on the battery.  I'm 85% peeved that I have to again reload my data/app preferences and somewhere find my photos because photostream didn't activate because the phone wouldn't verify.  Whatever...they exist in a backup somewhere.  This is a complete nightmare though, and Apple should really work on clearing up the tremendous issues it has when it releases major iOS revisions.  If you are going to "allow" people to restore from a backup, you should make sure it works, and make sure that I won't have to restore to factory as a new phone in a few weeks after complaining about how bad the phone seems to be working.  I'm cautiously optimistic, but now extremely perturbed.

(Purely my speculation/random thoughts/experience)

Yes, power management is going to be handled by the software. If there are excessive power drains, or stuck processes the software should be able to handle these by shutting down the rogue app/commands/power drain.

From reading around (I may be wrong here) but the power demand to the antenna increases the weaker the reception in the area. With the phone having two antenna it would make sense that the power demand should increase. But not in the way people have been describing. That would only be the case if the antennas worked both at the same time. As far I know (again I may be completely wrong here) they don't or shouldn't be active at the same time unless there is some handover (software) of the signal between one to the other to go to the one with the strongest pickup. If there is a glitch in the software that regulates the switching over from one antenna to the other then it maybe its catching itself in this loop? The user might reset the signal/phone but without a full reset as new the looped process may still be going on in the background consuming power.

I'm on fresh IOS5 DFU reset number 4 - No icloud; virtually no location services; limited to no notifications and no ping.

Battery seems better today. I have promised it a external power pack if it behaves.

iNewb here. Switched over from the droid army.  Running a Verizon 32GB.

I have nothing to compare the battery usage to except what friend's have told me about their iP4 a couple months back.  They would say they'd get a day or so plus from a single charge.  And that would be high usage.  (I'd assume that would mean:  Running like it's supposed to run...with everything on.  No tweaking this and that. So that is how I'm runnign mine.) 

So far, I'm not sure how my battery compares to others, or for that matter, apple specs.  I think that's part of the problem here too.  People are hearing that the battery life is bad so they assume theirs is too.  Smart phones use power, I get that.  I guess i was just expecting to go a full day without charge.

Here are my stats from the first day or two (got the phone on 10/23).  (9 more days until return period closes!)

The past two days I have run the battery down to nothing from full charges.  Do these times seem normal?  How does it compare to the group?

Full Charge -> 5 hrs.10 min usage / 15 hr. 32 min standby ->2% battery

Full Charge -> 5 hrs 11 min usage / 22 hrs. 32 min standby ->2% battery

Today I pulled the phone off the charger at 7:40 Eastern.  It's now 10:00 Eastern and I'm at 88% (music/podcast for 30 min; few emails here and there; light web).

I know these are a litt shy under apple's claim of 6 hrs on 3G.  How does this compare to the group?

shutting out your apps in the task manager doesnt actually shut them out......

try opening multiple safari pages

then end the task in the manager and when you open it up again it will be right where you left it.....

so your iphone is using power to remember what you where last looking at. i actually find it really annoying id just prefer a google homepage.

im getting my new one today and am going to use it as i wish to use it.... if im still having problems i will keep getting replacements..... ill have 10 iphones if i have to it doesnt bother me.....

my battery has improved over the last few days though but ive got alot turned off that i wanted on....

also apple needs to ship these phones with everything turned off! as stock and then the user decides what needs to be on or not

THIS WORKS!

I upgraded and restored from backup and have tried various fixes etc that work for a bit and then stop working....

Yesterday I did this  SETTINGS>GENERAL>RESET>RESET ALL SETTINGS

DO NOT erase all content and settings DO NOT I repeat erase all content and settings

RESET ALL SETTINGS will erase your  wifi settings as well as any personalization that you have made in settings (font size sound alarm settings wallpapers etc  and reset them all  to the default..... it took me all of 15 minutes to do and reset everything to my preferred settings and my battery is what I expect it to be (ie just like my ip4 did before the upgrade).

I did not disable ANYTHING other than bluetooth-- icloud is on siri is on location services is on everything is on. AND THE PHONE DOESN'T GET HOT

enjoy your iphones folks