Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I too have noticed the drain on my black 4s 64gb.  I have had two that experienced the same problem but the replacement was as a result of the horribly yellowscreen.  I didn't notice the battery life drain until really a good few days of solid use.

I've tried a lot of scenarios to see how to reproduce the issue or at least see what drains the battery the least.  I've seen a lot of posts about location services and tweaking settings but what I've found is my real killer appears to be the mail app.  Like everyone else my usage appears to be equal to my standby time when running in what I consinder my normal mode.  But with the following test scenarios 've watched my usage start to shrink in comparison.  All the tests I've run are in order of the longest life to the shortest life.

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), No Apps, No Mail, WiFi to my AirPort, Connected to local AT&T cell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for a over 10 minutes, once it drops to 99 percent and I wake the phone to WiFi I lose about a 1% every 4-5 minutes of use.

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), No Apps, No Mail, WiFi to my AirPort, Connected to home AT&T Microcell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for a over 10 minutes, once it drops to 99 percent and I wake the phone to WiFi I lose about a 1% about every 4 minutes of use. (MicroCell for some reason always causes me issues but it is my baseline)

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), All my Apps Fresh, Exchange Mail, Notifications Off, WiFi to my AirPort, Connected to local AT&T cell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for about five minutes. Phone loses about 1% every three minutes

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), All my Apps Fresh, Exchange Mail, Notifications On, WiFi on or off, Connected to local AT&T cell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for about a minute from unplug. Phone loses about 1% every two minutes

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), iCloud Restore Apps, Exchange Mail, Notifications On or Off, WiFi on or off, Connected to local AT&T cell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for about a minute from unplug. Phone loses about 1% every two minutes

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), iTunes Restore Apps, Exchange Mail, Notifications On or Off, WiFi On or Off, Connected to local AT&T cell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for about a minute from unplug. Phone loses about 1% every two minutes (No difference)

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), iTunes Restore Apps, Exchange Mail, Notifications On or Off, WiFi On or Off, Connected to local AT&T cell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for about a minute from unplug. Phone loses about 1% every two minutes.  Reset All Settings Performed.  Charged to full from degraded state.  All results same with loss of 1% about every two minutes.

Factory Fresh (Clean Restore), iTunes or iCloud Restore Apps, Exchange Mail, Notifications On or Off, WiFi On or Off, Connected to local AT&T cell or MicroCell, full charge:  Stays at 100% during standby mode for about a minute from unplug. Phone loses about 1% every two minutes.  Reset All Settings Performed.  Charged to full from degraded state. Deleted Exchange Mail Account.  Phone appears to run more like my 4s.

So my only conclusion is that there is something up with mail hogging cycles or dumping.  I've even noticed mail running with no mail client configured or icloud account setup (using memory apps).

This must be a software problem.  Hopefully it gets fixed soon.... while I know batteries can cycle many times I hate churning through a month worth of cycles in the less than two weeks I've had the phone.

My standby time test:

- turned off bluetooth, data and wifi

- only made 5 calls during this whole test, total talk time <5mins

- didn't touch the phone at all other than these 5 calls

Total standby time from 100% to 0% is 156hrs

Let me just chime in as well.

I upgraded from my old iPhone 3G to iPhone 4S yesterday (yep, that's right: a two-notch upgrade), and while I was impressed by the quantum leap in speed improvements and all the new features I have been dying for in my incapable iPhone 3G, I was much less impressed by the battery life. At first, I put it off to me playing around with the features on my iPhone 4S (video, HDR camera, Siri etc.), but even after that battery life seems to be a larger drain than on my old iPhone 3G. I can't do exact comparisons since the iPhone 3G has no percentage meter for its battery, and I have returned it to my carrier anyway (I'm from Singapore; my previous contract with my carrier mandated that I return the phone after my contract is up), but judging from experience using Safari to browse the web entails a larger drain on battery life than my old iPhone 3G. Even playing music seems to drain the battery quite fast - based on my gut feel, it seems to be at least 20-25% faster.

I have also experienced my iPhone 4S becoming warm to the touch; more so when it's running something processor-intensive, but it gets warm even when I'm just typing up this message on my iPhone via Safari. My old iPhone 3G, while having to struggle with even that at times, rarely ran hot unless the app itself was something intensive. And I thought the problem of warm iPhones could have gone away when I bade farewell to my iPhone 3G!

Granted, I have not experienced any battery drains that are as alarming or drastic as some reported here (halving or emptying of battery life in standby after a few hours etc.), but overall this is still worse than my old iPhone 3G, which it replaced. I have tried turning off many of the new iOS 5 features as suggested, with little improvement. Since I had set up my iPhone 4S as a backup of my iPhone 3G, I wonder if that's what causing the problem. I'm reluctant to do a full restore on my iPhone 4S and setting it up as new, since that means a lot of manual work backing up and re-setting the settings.

Right now the only thing I haven't tried is to have tech support look into this (i'm planning to later), and to drain the battery completely and have it charged overnight, which I will try tonight if I can't get anything from tech support.ruggt now though, I just hope Apple figures this out before this blows into the next Antennagate.

It will get warm, it's a powerfull CPU, apple also notes this in the manual.

I am also getting serious drain in my iphone 4s battery life. Probably it's the A5 processor.

OK I think I have yet another fix that I don't think has been mentioned which does seemed to have done the trick for me.  Wednesday morning 30 mins of my new 4S sitting on the table doing nothing = 5% battery drain.  This morning 60 mins = 0% drain.  So what have I done?  Well just about everything in the thread to cut down notifications and location BUT what I think really worked was the new iTunes Store option of Automatic Downloads - only works on WiFi which fits and as soon as I turned it off - problem solved.  Could that service be polling the iTunes server and looking for new purchases just a little too often?  Go to Store under settings to give it a try!

"So my only conclusion is that there is something up with mail hogging cycles or dumping.  I've even noticed mail running with no mail client configured or icloud account setup (using memory apps)."

I just verified that MobileMail is running on my fresh install with no mail accounts being configured.

Has anyone else noticed odd battery charging behavior? Sometimes my battery will get stuck charging at 99% , and stay there no matter how long it is charged. Other times the battery will charge and the iphone will get very hot, and a few times now i've noticed the phone will charge to 100% and it will stay there even after 30-45 minutes of use.

I hope this is a software issue and not hardware...

eXAKR, I also upgraded from a 3G. I'm voluntarily going back to it - which says a lot about how maddening this 4S issue is.

92%

Usage 31 Minutes

Standby 2 Hours, 24 minutes

Cellular Network Data

Sent 29.0 KB

Received 137 KB

About 15 awdd_ messages

This worked for me my iphone 4S would drain 1% every 4-5 mins.I plugged iphone in went under contacts and didnt let sync from my google acct and deleted all contacts. Then I went into settings-general-reset erase all content and settings, plugged back into computer synced it. Then went to summary and under versions i hit restore. I also deleted my email accounts and shut the iphone done then turned back on and redid the emails and manually did contacts.. Works great now!!

Update

I received a call from Apple today about the Battery Usage "app" I had downloaded and emailed diagnostics for earlier in the week.

Unfortunately I was at work so we played phone tag and he was unable to call me back today.  I am hoping he will call me back on Monday about the information from the Apple engineers.

Did anyone else get information?

I went to soho apple store today. I told them my phone had really bad battery life, so a girl took it and did factory restore, she came back after some tests and told me that everything were good, the battery had no problem (my phone was 20% , usage: 4 hours 2x minutes). I turn off the wifi and had no app running, and it still dropped 1% in 4-5 minutes, so I told her about this, she said it is very normal because the basement(new soho store) has bad singal for AT&amp;T, and your phone was trying hard to get the signal that's why they battery draining quick, so I did another test with airplane mode on trying to prove it's not because of the **** signal, the result gave me 1% for  6 minutes with airplane mode on and no app running, but she still insisted the phone is good, it just because I had the screen on so the battery life draining fast. I was so ****** off by this girl, she really knows nothing and apple should fire her. 

Same with my iphone4s. The battery lifetime reminds me my old 2nd generation ipod touch at the end of its life...

I cannot spend 24h without charging my iphone4s even if I do not use it.

As per my last post many pages ago I had 5% drain per hour in standby with only IMAP email and and exchange for google contacts and calendar set to manual. Phoned apple and after the usual questions they sent me a new phone. Before changing I did a backup to the cloud with only accounts and FB configured (all other apps deleted).

Got the new phone, did a full charge, restored from the cloud and drained to 0%. I turned off contacts sync in exchange (as i am suspicious of that form other posts) and started testing. The phone has now done 16H on standby with some light use and is only down to 75%.  The usage numbers are also as i expect (last time they  were much higher than my actual usage). This is as I expect it to be.

I am not convinced this will last as I am sure there are SW bugs causing this. I also suspect there are some duff batteries out there, with 4 million shipped a 0.1% failure rate is a lot of units.

I will turn back on exchange contacts and keep you posted.