Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I work for AT&T in a retail location and I also happen to own an iPhone 4S. We have many customers including myself who are also having the same problem with the battery life. So far none of the solutions that we tried worked including dimming the brightness, turning off bluetooth and wifi etc. From a technical stand point it seems to me that it has to do with the dual core processors that the new iPhone has and somewhere down the line iOS5 is playing a huge part as well. I will blast this on Twitter and Facebook and have friends and family do the same. Apple really needs to get to the bottom of this I heard that there are some members of their staff contacting some customers about it hopefully they contact me as well. I speak for a ton of angry customers coming each and every day into our stores and it's getting to the point we're there returning the devices and going back to their original phones.

That is exactly what fixed the problem for me.  After turning that off my 4S battery does better than my 4 did.

I understand wanting to make interfaces simpler, but I suspect it would be easier for people to figure what was going on with their phones if they actually produced error messages like some OS's will.

100% this morning at 7:00am, it is now 7:55pm.  

Phone has been in mostly stand by all day.  Minus a few phone calls.

I have restored my iPhone, set up as new phone.  I have all notifications disabled, all location services disabled except for weather.  iCloud disabled except for backup.

Current battery percentage = 24%

Apple, please fix this soon so I don't have to disable all my **** just to have a battery left by the end of the night.

If Steve Jobs was still alive, this would be addressed by now.

Sonofa...

I have what looks like a factory scratch or blemish that I noticed today, right between the glass and metal frame. Almost looks as if the glass is delaminating.

I was experiencing a lot of hissing on calls which seems to have dissipated.

Then disappointed in the battery... not as bad as many others but a downgrade from my 3G when it was new.

I had a factory scratch on my first iphone 4S. They swapped it out, but that one's microphone didnt work. I am currently on my THIRD iphone 4S.

Perhaps this is obvious, but its new to me..be sure to double click the Home button and disable the applications that are multitasking in the background. A little window appears at the bottom with the icons that are running in the background, hold down on them and the little red dash appears and you can close all the extra running processes. I discovered this in the past hour and it seems to have improved my battery, at least in the short time I have tried it.

I'm not going to say that my battery life is great, but it is very good now.  When I first got the phone, it would deplete to 0% in about 12 hours with typical use:  a few minutes of telephone calls, a few emails and two hours of web surfing or apps.  Ironically, I found that it would deplete at virtually the same rate (12 hours) regardless of whether I was using it OR in standby mode.  I followed most of what others have suggested in terms of reducing location services, disabling most of icloud, etc.  I did not start with a fresh install of the phone.  I am using a restored iphone 4 for my 4s (don't want the hassle of reloading everything).  I did not find that making these changes had much of an impact on battery life.

So today, my phone is doing really well on battery life.  Phone has been used very lightly for 18 hours, but I have a 54% charge.  To me that's ok. 

What I did was the basic action that Apple and some others recommended:  I completely discharged the battery and then did a full uninterrupted recharge.  I am doing another full drain and will repeat.  But my experience has been positive with a reconditioning of the battery.  i know others have been frustrated that this didn't work for them; but it seems to be producing positive results for me.  Note:  for what it's worth, I am sync'g exchange and Google contacts.  Some recent stories seem to be attributing battery loss to contact issues in me.com or google.  For me, that doesn't seem to be the issue.

How long did you have it before you did the exhange? I just received and activated mine on Wednesday. Noticed the blemish today.

Also, how did you go about exchanging it? Going to the store, waiting in line and hoping they have some or do they have some stock on-hand to deal with replacements for those who have already purchased?

I noticed it the same day (launch day) I got it, but took it in the day after. I went to my local apple store and they had it in stock so they swapped it out for a replacement - out of the black box. I didn't wait in line, but making a genius appointment would be your best bet.

Cheers!

Perhaps I should report it to AppleCare as well?

I have the sam exact problem!! LAME!

Some people said that their battery lasted longer once they quit the Facebook app. My battery is pretty bad but I so not have the app...

One more question, if you don't mind.

What is this "black box" people keep referring to?

I'm having precisely the same issue -- which seems to be two issues:

It seems to throttle up after using "Find my friends" and not go back down.  Killing the app seems to clear up the problem.  I also did a test where I deleted the friends and the problem didn't go away.  Starting the app seems to be the source of some of the issues.

The other problem I've noticed is the phone's Mail app seems to get into a race condition and the phone heats up and just consumes battery like crazy.  Unfortunately I can't see the console logs back far enough when running against xCode to know what's going on, but I'd bet it's some sort of low mem issue with APNs firing off, needs more memory, and it gets stuck in a state where it just cycles.  (I have multiple email accounts on my device.)  [I woke the device up once and saw Mail just spinning away -- not having updated in over an hour -- the phone was really warm and killing Mail seemed to fix things forawhile.]