Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I've had similar experiences, losing battery faster than i thought possible. For instance, with normal use, my iPhone 4 would be at about 30% by the end of the day - i talked a lot. In the case of 4S, it doesn't make it through 2/3 of the day without a full recharge. I was on a 24 min call with applecare about the battery drain issue, and I even informed the rep about this: during that call my battery went down 11%. I left the phone in the car when i walked into the gym for 45 min - down 6%. I find myself hooking it up to a charger wherever I am just so I know i'll be able to use it.

I saw the post about restoring it and reinstalling the software, then draining it and recharging it. I tried that - no luck. Anyone have any other suggestions?

I've talked to applecare twice about the issue - all they tell me to do is turn off location services and other background processes. No luck there either. Hopefully someone will be able to actually provide a useful solution.

@AndrewC1970:

"The only real difference between the phones would be the processor speed and Siri.  As a result I am concerned that the 'fault' may not be just software related."

My biggest fear, and the reason I opted to return the phone and cancel the contract, is he difference between he two phones that you didn't mention: the antenna.

I deeply believe his is a software problem. But, given the previous antenna problem on the 4, I wasn't willing to bet on it.

I think hysteria is taking over now..

The problem has nothing to do with settings.

I'll repeat again:

• Backup your 4S to iCloud (some say this step is not necessary, that it's the next one that counts)
• Boot in recovery mode and do a restore!
• Reinstalled everything manually (apparently, at that point you could also recover from the previously made 4S backup, if you have one)

At this point, my battery was still draining like mad (35% overnight)

It was the next step that then completed the process:

• Drain the battery!! (I drained it to 5%, apparently anything lower than 20% might do it)
• Full recharge (leave it charging for a while when it hits 100%)

My battery has been showing 100% for almost three hours now.

As far as I can tell - I just tried out what you mentioned with the exchange accounts - i still seem to have some process(es) thats eating up CPU cycles. Still working on removing things to try and figure out what it could be.

@ycooreman: thats precisely what i tried. I haven't had luck yet. Please post back if you discover anything else.

That's almost exactly the same I did with mine. I had great results. Let's see if we can figure out what is different between our two set ups.

I'm having the same problem with battery life.  I've had an iPhone 4 since the day of the launch and would regularly be at 80% at the end of the day.  With the iPhome 4S restored from the iPhone 4 as well as starting it over as a new device I am at 50% or less (yesterday it was 39%) at the end of the day.  I have not changed how I used my iPhone at all.. I'm seeing a 50% reduction in battery life with the 4S.

I've seen no issues related to WiFi.  It's currently the only real service running on my phone.

It was important to actually delete the Exchange account, reboot the phone and then re-configure Exchange with only mail syncing.  Simply turning off syncing didn't work.  I'm not a developer, but it might have to do with an open process that doesn't close after simply turning off syncing for Exchange. 

I did the restore twice.

Once doing a backup afterwards, once installing from scratch.

Then the battery drain.

My iPhone4 drains like mad since updating to iOS5. I manage to lessen the effect turning some settings off. Settings that are iOS5's features that make it useful but it's still not as good as 4.3.5. Is there anyway I can downgrade back to 4.3.5?

I've gotta weigh in as well just so Apple realizes the severity of the issue.I have nothing new to add other than the rapid drain didn't start until 5-6 days after I bought the phone. I also think the phone eats form our cupboards at night, no proof yet will post as soon as I do.

From studying the issue, the battery seems to drain faster when the phone is not actively being used. My 4S used to lose 20-25% overnight while I was asleep whereas my iPhone 4 hardly lost any charge. This led me to conclude a background process that gets suspended during active use is what is draining the battery. Push notifications are not so resource intensive but polling a server is. Looking around, I saw this:

Settings/Store and turned off NYTimes "Automatically download new content when on Wi-Fi" . Uncheck it.

I theorize that either the NYT is doing polling and/or they update their content so frequently that the phone is constantly fetching data.

I have not turned off anything else like Siri, Location Services etc.

Since then, I lose 4-5% overnight and can go 1.5 days before needing to recharge.

Incidentally, I tried calibrating the battery by draining it and then charging to 100%. No effect for me.

Anyway, this is what worked for me. Hope it does for you as well.

I agree...there is something fishy going on.  I have a 3G iPad 2 on iOS5 with the exact same settings, apps and services running and there is no issue with battery life.  I'm hoping it isn't a hardware issue because I'm really enjoying the 4S other than the constant charging.

I just ran a test with a friend of mine that has the same issue, but he does not have an Exchange account.  We simply turned off and deleted all of his iCloud services, rebooted and started them up one by one.  He's not seeing any issues with his battery for the past hour.  Could there be an issue with corrupted files during iCloud syncing causing a loop or other process to keep running?  I had a similar issue a few years ago with a 3GS and a mail account that had huge public folders.  The iPhone would start a sync, but because of the size of the folders it would start another scheduled sync before the first sync completed.  The result was that there was a sync process going non-stop, causing the battery to drain in the same way it is now with the 4S.  I'm grabbing at straws at this point because I have no idea. 

I have not notice any problems with my battery yet but i still decided to run a test and compare myiPhone 4 to the 4S.

Both fully charge and playing music i was about 50% in 10 hours on my iPhone 4S and the iPhone 4 was at 95%. i went ahead and turned everything off including 3G. Andthe results were very similar. On standby the 4S was at 90% after 24 hours and the iPhone 4 at 97%. I am thinking it has to do with some of the softwares that are present on iPhone 4S and not on the iPhone 4 but which one?