Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Lithium ion batteries have built in protection circuit, that never let's the battery charge to 100% (1) and never lets the battery fully discharge (2). This is to protect the battery from being destroyed or even explode.

(1) when you charge the battery at 100% at 20 degrees temperature, and then the temperature becomes, say 30 degrees, the charge within the battery rises and this irreversibly destroys it (it may even burn). Charging the battery while it is hot also destroys the chemistry, this is why it's bad idea to keep yur laptop plugged in AC at all times (especially when under heavy load and generating internal heat)

(2) when the lithium-ion battery is discharged below certain level, the chemistry is irreversibly destroyed and the battery becomes unusable. It cannot be 'revived', like NiMH batteries anymore.

All this means, that you never, ever use the full capacity of an lithium-ion battery, unless perhaps if you can keep the environmental conditions perfect.

In recent years, "long life" lithium ion batteries were introduced and I believe the iPhone 4S battery is one of these.

I charged my phone to 100% and after it has been at 100% for a while I unplugged it and it was in standby over night. 5 hours later and it still had 100%. So it is definitely not draining when in standby, but as soon as I start to use it, it goes very fast.

Right now I am at 5h56min of standby and 56minutes of usage with 91% left. I am on wifi, 3G is activated, location services are off, Siri on, bluetooth off and I made a 10 minute call. FB, Twitte and email all have push off.

I am happy with 1hour usage=10% of battery, but it is a lot more when I check Twitter and FB. I also would like to have those push notifications on, at least for Twitter and email. But I'll continue to mess around with it.

I have noticed that Photostream is giving me some trouble at times. Occassionally, I take a lot of pictures at once, and then the phone starts to crash. When I go into the picture gallery to look at them, it sometimes freezes up, when I slide through the pics, it freezes right in the middle of 2 pics. I wondered if the upload to photostream might cause my battery issues as well.

Anyway, I still love my phone, the battery could be a bit better, yeah, but other than that there is no better phone for me.

I upgraded to 5.1 last night and the battery life is awful!!!

The phone completely ran flat overnight so I did a full charge and then left it for 2 hours @ 100% before unplugging it.

It now loses 1% before my eyes (about every 5 minutes).

The Useage shows 1 hour 27 minutes since last charge and Standby time of 3 hours 48 minutes.

The phone has become unuseable...

Suggestions please because I cannot use this for work and self use like this.

I used to get over 24 hours out of a full charge.

Uploading photos to Photostream, especially on 3G is serious battery drain if you snap a lot of photos. The iPhone 4S makes these 8 megapixel pictures at about 2-4 MB each. Sending anything on 3G (cellular) requires a lot of power.

Correction, it is losing 1% each 2 mintues, I have just timed it.

They recommend you only do full cycle charge once every month not once every day.

Yes, I consider that very good.

I have tried several of the different things people mentioned here.  I'll let you know how it works out.  To let you know where I was at after the update a couple of days ago, I fully charged my 4S to 100% yesterday night, unplugged it, put it on my nightstand and went to bed.  When I woke up in the morning it was down to 4%, so it burned through 96% of battery life sitting on my nightstand doing nothing (roughly 8 hours).

I must say, I have hootenannies great life out of iOS 5.1

I used the delta upgrade immediately after my iPhone had charged.

I get 10 hours usage (mostly 3G surfing and the use of self-made apps)

I get 2 days 2 hours usage

I still have 30%

Plsss dont post such stats....Your iPhone will be mugged at gun point....

Awesome results.....

Is this good battery?  Didn't listen to music.  Used Wi-Fi.  Used FaceBook every now and again.  Switched between 3 times very frequently to check to see if I had messages on them since I was messaging people on all three.  Bluetooth off, location services are On, but I have every app switched to "Off" for Location Services.  Cellular usage enabled.  Timezone disabled.  Then I guess some other minor things turned off.

Battery meters are notiriously inaccurate.  I would do the calibrate routine (run down below 20% and then reboot, and charge overnight.

davecoronel wrote:

 

For me I Had :

 

Standby time of : 1 day and 1 hour

Usage : 7 hours or so. and that is still with 8% of battery left.

 

I usually do texting, music, phone calls, web browsing and siri too. and this is my result.

 

Is that good? I didn't use the iphone 4s much since I'm at school.

7 hours is NOT light usage.  If you really used the phone for that long, you are doing just fine with battery life.  If you didn't, then you may have the 'phantom usage' problem, which IOS 5.1 update seems to fix for most users.

sbailey4 wrote:

 

EXACTLY!!, What I have tried to get across since page 20 LOL. The specs are either or not AND. So 8hr talk then get out you charger. 9 hr wifi done plug it in. Leave it lying on the desk 200hrs later recharge it. Folks are not grasping that whole concept. And yes some here are not getting the correct usage like .05% per hr on standby so there are other issues with their setup or device that need addressing. But the majority of iPhone 4s users are and now that iOS 5.1 has released even more seem to be. So the ones here that think we are brainwashed and Apple trolls all that other  horse s*** ...well say what you want. If we are loosing .05% an hour of battery in standby then thats what Apple said we would get so why complain about it?

duckie91 wrote:

 

and btw when they say 200 hours of standby they literally mean if you just leave it in standby it will last 200 hours. 8 hours of 3G talktime ONLY if you just do that.

I believe that is .5%, not .05%.

Most users seem to forget that many of the things they do use more than one function at the same time, such as 3G talk time, and the screen is on, or 3G data and the GPU is working hard on the movie they are also watching, or the adventure game they are playing while they chat.

In any case, it is ALWAYS doing something.  Watching the CPU activity on one of the system monitor displays is very educational.

waterise wrote:

 

I thought over-charging electronics killed their batteries?  I know that's true for laptops at least.

That is true, but lithium ion (polymer) batteries have an annoying tendency to explode if overcharged, so they MUST have a chip in the package that prevents overcharging.  It also prevents deep discharge.  Battery meters usually display an actual 10-20% charge as '0' and 90-95% charge as 100.  This maximizes the life of the battery, prevents annoying overheating (with explosions), and allows some way of pretty accurately displaying the state or your battery charge.  It is not exactly accurate, nor is it exactly linear.  This is why Apple recommends discharging to cutoff and recharging overnight about once a month.  I find this very hard to do because I really don't like to start my day with a battery 1/2 discharged, and it takes 2 to 4 days to run my 4S dry unless I just turn on a really battery draining function to intentionally drain the battery. 

My wife has had a 3GS for about 1.5 years, and she charges it every night, even though she still have 50% charge or more each night.  So far, there have been no problems.