Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I am having SO many problems with my 4S battery. I used an iPhone 4 ever since it came out and my biggest battery consumption on a daily basis is that I push all of my email accounts. Even so, I was able to get my iPhone 4 to last from about 7:00 in the morning until about 9:00 at night without having to recharge it. Ever since I got the 4S, I have been having to recharge by midday and then again in the evening. The battery simply doesn't last at all! I was first tempted to think that this was a 4S problem, but my wife, who still uses an iPhone 4 but has upgrdated to iOS5, is also having her battery last a lot less than it did previously.

I hardly ever use Siri, as I find it disappointing for 90% of the questions that I ask it - it simply doesn't give me the reponse that I need and gets completely lost - it really is only useful for transcription. I have the Diagnostics and Usage reporting turned off. I am disciplined about turning WiFi and Bluetooth off when I am not using them. I have Auto Brightness turned on and the default brightness level is set on the lower end of the range. I just now received a call that lasted 4 minutes and my battery went from 22% left to 18% left. This after having recaharged the phone three times already today (and it's only 9:45 at night).

This is incredibly annoying, frustrating, and it's making me wonder whether to return the phone. I cannot always have my phone tethered to an electricity outlet and I didn't get it so that I would have to worry about battery life. I am shocked when I pick it up to do some surfing, reading and email checking, look back down a few minutes later and see 5-10% of the battery is gone in a matter of minutes. Even on standby, and without using it at all, it seems to lose at least 10% per hour. This is entirely unacceptable!

If the problem is as widespread as it seems to be (and 106 pages of comments on this thread alone would seem to support that perception), I am depply troubled about what, if any, testing Apple did before releasing the 4S/iOS5.

My stats aren't so bad, if I was actually using the phone to browse the web over 3G regularly. Trying to figure out if I have a problem.

Took off @ ~8am PST. It is not 8:51pm.

54% Battery Left

Usage - 2 hours, 54 minutes

Standby - 12 hours, 10 minutes

55 minutes of call time

No WiFi, No Bluetooth, 1 email account (not set to push), 1 cloud accout.

Mostly texting... only 162mb downloaded and 6.7mb uploaded.

sjgalla wrote:

 

So, turning off email push actually worked for me.  But, I still contend that this should not be an issue. Blackberries push.  If the iPhone wants to be the corporate answer replacing blackberries, why not design a phone that does the thing blackberry has done from the beginning?

Blackberry push is patented and works completely differently and way more efficiently.  Blackberry push entails registering each of your email accounts with Blackberry servers.  Therefore Blackberry knows exactly when you've received a new email and then pushes it to the device from their servers.

iPhone "push" is more of a "pull" in a way.  It has to keep an active connection open in order to know when a new email has been received.  Think about it - Gmail has no knowledge that you own an iPhone, so how could they immediately send the message to it via push?  Answer: they don't.  The iPhone asks for a message and then the request sits there (open) until one is received.  This is much different than Blackberry who knows exactly when each of your accounts receives a message and sends it to your phone directly from Blackberry's servers.  The only problem with this appraoch is that if the Blackberry servers go down (like they did a few weeks ago), no one gets any email from any of their accounts!  Otherwise, it's a better approach from a battery life standpoint for sure.

That's why after agonizing for two weeks, I returned my IPhone 4s to Verizon today, the drop dead day. I went back to my iPhone 4 and adverted a 2 year extension on my contract. Others suggested turning off various functions and apps but hello, this is a smart phone, why should I have to turn everything off? Other issues as well such as Sirus functioning properly maybe 50% of the time. I lost stuff that did'nt backup as it should but I feel like a big burden lifted off. I will never again buy a product fresh out of the gate.

Another user here (unlocked in AUS, 64 gb white) with poor battery life

As chicago290 said, I am not going to bother fiddling with turning off features in order to avoid charging my 4S twice a day.

Looking forward to iOS 5.01, hopefully with a proper fix for battery life

just received my iphone 4s yesterday .. despite turning everything off .. i'm losing 10-15% battery life every hour

Blackberry push is patented and works completely differently and way more efficiently.

NMP. One way or another, they should find a way to compensate for the extra processing. Perhaps put longer-lasting battery in it... whatever. They should not be relying on their customer-base to limit what is frankly a basic function of a smartphone because it causes the battery to drain at an abnormally fast rate.

This is Apple - their entire business is predicated on redesigning the wheel.

Because those are made without the accessories and are not in the fancy boxes so they are cheaper to make and because they are exchange units the user will have all that aleady. Doesn't make sense to pack a brand new one just for every exchange.

I never had a Iphone before but the battery life on my iphone is horriable and all the settings turned off apps closed even restored contacts etc. I even fixed the things that would drain battery life and every 5mins 1% of the battery goes. My droid lasted long then this, im taking it back to the store.

This stuff (accessories) is from China and probably is a few pennies on the dollar... so what is the cost of having a separate packaging line handle exchange phones?

I am also experiencing horrid battery life with my 4s. I will have 100% charge in the morning and after minimal usage (no push/cloud/etc... only wifi and bluetooth on) throughout the day, I'll have somewhere around 20% battery left before I plug it in to charge at night (far worse than my 3Gs). Add to that terrible signal strength and reception issues. I am really regretting this upgrade as it's a long-term investment and large expense for me. Did I get a lemon? Should I go to the Apple store and ask for a replacement?

I was able to fix both my iPhone 4s and my iPad 2. I had actually exchanged my iPhone 4s at the local apple store and one of the things I noticed when returning it, I look back now I realize the connection. With my second iPhone I started to have the same problems that I had with the first one. The battery life drains really fast. In some cases a few hours and like everyone else I turned off everything. I downloaded an app to monitor the CPU and that helped a ton. With everything off I set the phone to airplane mode and the CPU was running at 80%. If you play a song through iTunes the CPU runs at about 10% and with pandora it runs at about 15% so you get the idea. Running at 80% if you place your fingers on the apple logo on the back you can feel it heating up pretty fast.

So because everything was off that I thought needed to be off I hard powered off the phone and turned it on again to see where it was at. It was then down to 3% and that was probably the monitor app I was using. As soon as a minute went by the phone fell asleep. When I woke it up the CPU went up to 100% and then slowly went down to the 80% again. I did this a couple of times hard powering it off and getting the 3% and then waking it up to be at 80%.

Back to the one thing I noticed when it returned the phone was when I swiped my finger down to view the notifications I could see that the screen was kinda vibrating. It was only doing it slightly but I pointed it out to the apple guy and he agreed there was something wrong. Thats when he exchanged it..

So when i noticed it again with the new phone I turned off every notification separately under the settings notifications menu and powered it off again. This time when I turned it on from falling asleep it went to 100% again but then fell all the way down to 3%. I tried it a bunch of times and also changed it on my ipad2 and the results were the same every time. I then turned Siri and wifi back on and I haven't had a problem. In fact it's been about and hour and I texted my girlfriend a couple of times and I still have 100% battery life.

I'm going to slowly turn things back on and see what happens from there. Turn off all of your notifications in addition to all other things and slowly work your way back to having everything back on.

The problem with my battery drain seems to be something running in the background.  I turned off all background apps I could see, shut down as many notifications as I could without making it a dumb phone (even took off calendar notfications, though I left weather widget on), turned off reporting to Apple, kept mail as fetch, turned off time zones, etc.  Wifi on (but not used at work), bluetooth off.  Ask to join networks off.  Pretty much everything mentioned so far.  I went to work and did not touch the phone till about mid day to check on the battery. It was down to 97%, a min or two of usage-- so I thought turning off calendar notifications may have solved the problem.  I did not touch the phone again-- essentially it should have been on standby and by 5 pm there was a mysterous usage listed (45 min-- even though I did nothing), and I was down to 85%.  I think there was about 250k that was sent according to the cellular data use.  Whatever this causing this usage to occur during standby appears to be draining my battery as well.  The only thing I haven't really tried is doing a DFU restore and adding apps slowly back in.

jkozlow3 wrote:

 

sjgalla wrote:

 

So, turning off email push actually worked for me.  But, I still contend that this should not be an issue. Blackberries push.  If the iPhone wants to be the corporate answer replacing blackberries, why not design a phone that does the thing blackberry has done from the beginning?

 

Blackberry push is patented and works completely differently and way more efficiently.  Blackberry push entails registering each of your email accounts with Blackberry servers.  Therefore Blackberry knows exactly when you've received a new email and then pushes it to the device from their servers.

 

iPhone "push" is more of a "pull" in a way.  It has to keep an active connection open in order to know when a new email has been received.  Think about it - Gmail has no knowledge that you own an iPhone, so how could they immediately send the message to it via push?  Answer: they don't.  The iPhone asks for a message and then the request sits there (open) until one is received.  This is much different than Blackberry who knows exactly when each of your accounts receives a message and sends it to your phone directly from Blackberry's servers.  The only problem with this appraoch is that if the Blackberry servers go down (like they did a few weeks ago), no one gets any email from any of their accounts!  Otherwise, it's a better approach from a battery life standpoint for sure.

Not exactly true. Push works almost the same way as the way you described blackberry. For one thing gmail doesn't even have push when you set it up as a gmail account. If you set it up as an exchange then it does. Yahoo is one that has push because it does go through apple servers to push the alert to the phone but then the phone has to pull the emal from the server. The only thing that is pushed is the notice that you have an email waiting and the phone then downloads the new email. Push worked great on the iphone 4 and still works ok on the 4s but there is something no one has been able to find yet that is causing the battery drain and the heating phone. I have both of these issues and this is the first time since I owned the 3G. This is a problem with the 4s but I haven't seen too many folks having issues with the 4 on ios5. My guess is that since most of the beta testing was done on the iphone4 instead of the 4s there are some bugs that didn't get caught in beta testing. Remember all they did after the gold master was released to beta testers they flashed all the 4s phones and probably didn't do a thourogh test of the phone. Now there are over 6 million phones that are probably having problems and it probably is a software problem. I just hope we will see a fix soon.

I'm at 29 % life with the following. Started at 97% today at 7am (the first battery calibration stopped early)

Useage: 4 hrs 7 min

Standby: 9 hrs 51 min

Talk time 1 hour 32 min

Sent 2.6 MB

Received 35.9 MB

My 4 year old Iphone 2G lasted for two straight days and now the 4S is barely lasting one day. I shut off the phone every night and for about half the day. I turned off location service, icloud, brightness is on auto, and I shutoff all running apps. Bluetooth was the only thing on all day. Wifi was off.

I expected better battery life than my 4 year old phone. I know GPS and 3G drain more, but seriously I am only getting 1/2 of the advertised battery life. I'm draining it down and calibrating it again tonight / tomorrow. If this doesn't improve I'm considering a return.