Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Just an update to the overnight battery drain, I found that by removing all apps from the tray except for the clock helped cut down on overnight drain by over 20% for me. 

I still had the battery drain, however, once I started using it this morning.  By 2:30pm it was down to 48%, so I charged it back to 100% and did Reset All Settings.  Oddly, when the phone rebooted it asked me to set up as a new phone or restore from a backup.  I restored from an iCloud backup from last night, and when the phone rebooted again the apps were there but no music?  However, it seemed to fix the problem!  I have 16 minutes of usage, 20 minutes standby and still at 100%.  Everything is turned on, connected to work WiFi, BT on, iCloud fully on, and all Location Services on except for iAds.  Try it out, can't hurt to test it out!  I'll post my usage later on to confirm it's still hanging in there.

I'm having the same problem here with my 4s.  It seemed fine at first.  Then, a couple days ago, I noticed that, after starting the day fully charged, the battery would be nearly drained by the evening, even with minimal use of the phone.

I tried a couple suggestions I saw floating around, like turning off the sending of diagnostic information to Apple, turning of syncing with all the various services with iCloud (e.g. contacts, mail), deleting some third party apps, to no avail.

Then, yesterday, I wiped the phone completely and did a fresh re-install from iTunes.  I installed no third party apps, but I did configure the phone to sync with iCloud.  Pretty much I did little else to the phone. I charged the phone to 100% last night, then left it by my bedside overnight to see what would happen after making these changes.  This am, I awoke to find the phone almost completely discharged.  This is without using the phone for much of anything - no phone calls, no e-mail, no web browsing.  The only thing I did was flick the phone on a couple times to check the battery charge state, then flick the phone off promptly afterwards each time.

I went to the Apple store today.  By the time I got to see the Genius representative, the phone had completely discharged (would not turn on any more).  This is about 14 or 15 hours since full charge with it being essentially unused.  He did plug it in, charge it a little bit just so he could turn it on and tke a look at it.  I noted that by this point, the usage statistics fo the phone showed about 14 or 15 hours since last charge to 100%, but nearly all of this (13 or 14 hours) was idicated as being time in "usage."  Again, I have no third party apps installed at this point, so I don't konw what it is that could have kept the phone from going into sleep this entire time.

The Apple rep said he wasn't aware of any widespread issues with the battery for the 4S, though from this thread and news reports I am inclined to think otherwise.  He recommended turning off WiFi and bluetooth, which I don't really think is really, nor should it be necessary.   Reticently, he suggested reticelntly that he could switch out the phone, but at this point if there is no known fix, I told him I wasn't inclined to do that at this point.  Seems like such a waste, as from the reports I am hearing, and based on the amount of time my phone is showing in "usage" (despite the fact that I am not using it), it seems more likely this is a software problem than a hardware problem.

I'm going to wait a bit anxiously to see if Apple comes out with a fix before I ask to have this thing switched out.  Who knows, maybe it is a hardware issue.

I'll also continue to tinker, though I'm not optimistic at this point.  Is there a way I can see an error log from the phone without jailbreaking?

I have had every iteration of the iPhone.  The battery life on my 4S is the worst I've experienced so far.  I have not been keeping stats on this, but whereas I could disconnect my phone from USB at about 7AM and return home from work at 8-9PM with 20% battery left on my 4, with this phone I have to charge mid day and still might not make it home without charging again on the car ride home.  That's less than 1/2 the battery life.  I appreciate the new "find me" features, iMessage, etc., but the battery life is rough.

Wow!  This thread is blowing up!  I've been following it for a few days.  I am afraid to uplug my 4s.....lol  I hope Apple takes care of this mess before it's all over the news like the anttenagate.  now it's batterygate.

Just to chime in, I am using a 4S as well and the battery life seems to be not nearly as good as advertised. I don't think it is a hardware issue but has to be related to the OS as the OS has various things running internally. Considering that many to most here are on US networks, I am currently in Europe on a Finnish network, and my symptoms appear to be similar to most here. Again, this does not seem to be hardware related. I hope Apple is seeing these posts and will address it in the near future. Other than the battery issue the phone is great.

Have had the same experience as most of you.  Have limited location services for most apps and it has not had any real effect.  I saw a post on another site talking about how this may be due to icloud and a sync effort being frozen and not completing, am in process of checking this. 

I've been following this thread for quite a few days. I have tried all the suggestions so far including all the resets and turning off wifi, location services etc and still I'm losing 2% every 5minutes with real light usage.  I'm a first time iPhone user but even my God awful Nokia was better than this. Apple UK Havnt got a clue what's going on so I am stuck with a phone which I have to charge twice daily and not use all of its features for fear of it dying on me 3 hours after charging.

I am on the Rogers network in Canada using a 4S and can also attest to significant battery issues.

I lost 21% within the span of one hour this morning when I woke up and all I did was listen to music for 10min.

It's an ongoing issue - the only time the battery doesn't drain fast is when I'm in the subway where there's no reception so I'm led to believe it's a network connection issue.

Another issue I'm having is that the phone will reset itself randomly. It happened during a call, during song selection and during idleness. The phone resets and prompts for my unlock password. The diagnostic logs indicate "Springboard" crashes but I don't know how to interpret much more than that.

I am seeing a lot of crash logs. Go and check this location on your phones and see how many you've got, you can go in and see what processes are failing. Time to investigate

Settings->General->About->Diagnostics & Usage->Diagnostics & Usage Data

Dear Apple, please own up to the fact that there is a serious problem with the 4S batter. Too many people reporting problems for "crickets" noises to be streaming out of Cupertino, CA. I have a 4S and have experience simiilar issues as being reported here. Be honest and get a fix quick please!!!

4S 64gb Black.  Received it on the 14th of oct.  Did a back up and restore twice.  It slows down the battery drain for about 24hrs.  But after that I can drain the battery to 20% by noon(I usually start work by 8am) just by doing regular browsing & email.  Even if I turn off Siri the results are the same.  I hope there is a fix soon.  My Iphone 4 would go all day and into the next before I ever got to 20% left on a single charge.  I really hope there is a fix soon.

I thought I was going crazy, my 4s is dropping like crazy. I've done a lot of things that were suggested and I still have horrible battery life, I've turned things off and have tried resetting and everything else. It just seems to be little to no difference. I'm a little disappointed as this is my first iPhone and the battery life is soo bad, I hope Apple comes with a fix soon... I do appreciate everyone giving some advice as to resolve the problem.

Same here. I'm sometimes down to 40% battery by the end of the day even though it's been in standby for most of the day. Seems like I should be able to go a week in standby according to the 200 hrs estimate.

I've been out for half a day, took a few pictures, asked Siri a couple of questions.  same as with my 4 and the battery is 50% down !!   I thought this was an upgrade !!  There is something wrong with this phone.  Are there any fixes yet ??  firmware ?   I'm not doing anything differently than with my iPhone 4 and the battery seems to drain much faster.  Help !!

I am a new iPhone user and have the 4S 32GB. I don't use it much during the day, no iTunes, just phone, some messaging, WhatsApp and email. I'm at work during the day so I respond to email on my computer. My battery has been draining so quickly! In the course of 12 hours with minimal usage, the phone went to 8%. I went to the Apple store and he told me to turn off the GPS services and a bunch of notifications. That helped slightly, but not much. If I were to use the iTunes my phone would die before my work day ended. My BB 8900 from 2009 had better battery life than this phone does, even when I did tonnes of stuff on it!

Looking for a fix! Hope Apple responds to this!