Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Another vote for horrible battery life. My 64GB 4S with standard settings on day 1 unplugged from charger about 9 am, died about 10 pm with moderate use (organizing my apps into folders, downloading apps). I chalked it up to heavy use, but it keeps dying before the day's up, even though today I used it lightly, with astonishing battery drain in standby. This morning I'd changed my location services, usage reporting, etc., but with little effect, up at 8 am, died tonight about 11:30.

My wife's 4S has the same problem, working on conditioning her battery. We'll see if conditioning helps for now while Apple figures out how to optimize the battery life. Come on, Apple, a phone without a removable battery should  comfortably last at least 1 full day of heavy use or 2 days of light use.

David

Apple has some extremely bright people not least of all the late Mr Jobs.  I'm just astonished that they either didn't detect how fast the battery is depleted (with just using some of the features activated) or that they were aware and 'let it go'.   I'm hoping there's a software fix. Something tells me if there is one it's effect will be marginal. Hope I'm wrong.

I have a poor battery life, but i think every iPhone battery life is terrible.

I charge every single night, despite the fun of having

bluetooth off

wifi only one when im at home

notifications are on now, but only because its now a feature.

I've a question though, please? People say  ' disable Ping, that sometimes helps? ', why when i have the master option of restrictions set to ' off ', shouldn't that supercede anything that is switched on underneath that option.

Anyway, down to 84%, and it's only 9:59am, about 2hours standby, and 59 minutes usage.

I performed several tests, too.

In flight mode with absolutely zero usage (I was asleep) it lost 2% in 8 hours, which is very OK.

This night with standard settings it lost 50% in 7 hours.

What I am trying now is: Deactivate everything except the phone itself, and watch the drainage for an hour.

I called Apple about that earlier, and one ******** told me that the this is normal, because WiFi was on! Yeah, of course, 50% in 7 hours due to WiFi. If they continue to try to make customers believe that, they'll have big problems coming their way.

Just one thing: Do you guys suffer from the "SIM Pin"-Bug aswell? I. e., will your phone randomly lose connection to your carrier if you have SIM Pin activated?

Well there's something wrong somewhere.

Last night I downloaded the iPhone 4s .ipsw file manually. Booted my 4s into DFU mode and performed a factory reset of the iPhone through iTunes (holding alt on the keyboard whilst clicking Restore, then selecting the .ipsw file in my downloads folder). When it booted into iOS after the restore, I unplugged it from my mac (so it couldn't receive any data from iTunes) and ran through the setup procedure on the phone . I disabled Siri, location services and set it up as a new iPhone. After this I turned off Bluetooth, Wifi, Notifications, Ping, Facetime and iMessage. I didn't set up any e-mail accounts. Didn't log into the Appstore. Mobile data was switched on though and the SIM card was in. Basically it was just a phone and that was it.

The battery was at 89% and had been calibrated 4 times during the week leading up to this point. During various attempts to fix this problem.

By this time it was 12am so I went to bed and left it on it's own, not plugged in and not charging.

I woke up at 7am to find that the battery was down to 73%! This means the iPhone burnt through 16% in 7 hours! or 1% every 25.2 minutes. If you work that out over the phones 100% battery life, that's only 42 hours on standby (if my calculations are correct) and I hadn't even picked it up once. Nowhere near the 200 hours standby time advertised. I live in an area with good 3G connectivity and couldn't turn off 3G on the phone anyway as Apple have removed that option.

It also gave me a diagnostics error list as long as my arm under Settings-General-About-Diagnostics & Usage-Dianostics & Usage Data.

I've now removed the SIM card and switched on WIFI (as the phone is meant to be sending diagnostic data to Apple). It is now using 1% of battery every 68 minutes. With 100% of charge, this will only give me 73.3 Hours of standby time. Which is a joke!

Luckily I still have my iPhone 4, which is fully functional and working perfectly.

I believe the problem goes deeper than the settigns that users are applying to their devices. This is OS problem that Apple needs to address ASAP.

My battery is quite bad on my new iPhone 4s so is the signal strength, I am just doing a restore, funny thing is, I just started the restore and it is saying it is doing an iphone software update ?????? Surely not already ? Not heard anyone mention this

I have continued monitoring the battery. Downloaded battery doctor. Still draining fast. Maybe we should all  move to Droid. My son has one and has never had a problem. I dont think a replacement phone is a solution because this is a hardware problem. How can we get Apple to react?

I have posted here before and I am still experiencing really bad battery drain. I think the problem lies in the usage stats - mine is almost the same as standby even though I am not using the phone so something is running all the time and draining the battery. I have tried all the fixes and nothing works - in any case Apple's suggestion of turning everything off is not an option (similar to "you are holding the phone incorrectly" antenna "fix".

Im exactly the same as you tim0409 - usage going up at almost the same rate as stand-by - something is running constantly, and in my case I know that its only when connected to wifi (at home).

My wife's phone is however completly unaffected.  Must be a software bug somewhere in the settings.

Has anyone tried the nuclear option and done a factory reset to try and fix?

I've just fully charged my iPhone 4s. I have now turned off Wifi and Mobile Data as well. I have set a countdown timer for 4 hours and I predict that the battery will be down to 98%. Which means it will hit Apple claims of a 200 hour battery life on standby.

I will be extremely disappointed if that is the case.

I'll keep you posted.

No worries, Chris. I deactivated everything but the basic "telephone" feature, ie calling. In 1.5h it burnt through 5% already. Yeahhh.

I have done the nuclear option and everything worked as expected until I added my calendars (I have five of them I subscribe to all hosted on a Snow Leopard Server 10.6x machine).  Even if I set them to check manually, they still seem to be the catalyst that sends the battery life crashing.

I ended up restoring to my old "settings" as there was no point in reconfiguring everything.  I also don't like the screen (just hold it up against an old iPhone 4 and you can see how yellow it is).  If there is no update by this weekend I'm going to return it.  Siri is a novelty at this point, camera is marginally improved, speed doesn't seem all that great as I find Mail locks up on me all the time.

Agreed. Bought the 4S mainly for improved battery life and I find it just feels like its leaking out very quickly.

I been using this phone since launch day, noticed the battery drain, but thought it needs times to calibrate like any new battery + i've been rinsing all it's features an Siri integration.

But this moring I'm a little concerned. took it off charge at 6:45 (100%), returned to the phone 20 minutes later and it was at 92% !

I did nothing in that time, the phone received no emails/text or any other notification.

It's almost lunch time at work(12:29), ive been using the phone lightly, 4 texts and recieved about 10 emails through google that pushed to the phone with wifi on and my battery is already at 62%.

If I was using my originaly iPhone 4 I could go from 6:45am to 6pm an my battery would be around 75%

Battery drain isn't linear, you should only do test of full charge to depletion instead of these incorrect iterative updates.