Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Mi brand new 4s is sucking battery like crazy.....come on Apple, lets get this fixed.

I received my iphone 4s yesterday, charged it overnight and had a 30% battery drain after checking email for 10 minutes this morning. I upgraded from an iphone 3g and that 3-year-old phone holds a better charge than the 4s. Very disturbing. I hope Apple comes up with a fix fast.

Done. I'll keep you posted.

Interestingly, in the past two hours, I've noted 16 minutes minutes of "mystery usage." I've taken less than 10 screen captures and checked battery status a few times. Maybe that's 5 minutes, but not 16. Down 4% in that time. Up another 15+ awdd_ messages. Many processes running even though almost everything turned off.  Hummmmmm.

Anyway, I enabled Exchange at 8:54 AM at 83%. Down 1% in the 9 minutes since (I'm not otherwise using the device).

I've had the Exchange calendar and contacts turned off for 3 hours, and along with resetting all of the iCloud services I'm only down 7% of the battery with light email and texting over those 3 hours.  The interesting thing is that it's not warm to touch like it has been for the past couple days, which leads me to believe that something in those changes has taken load off the CPU.

I can't do it now right now, but I'm going to turn everything back on and try to re-create the issue and nail down the order of the changes.

But for now, it looks like the battery is performing as it should...

My first course of action will be to recalibrate my battery as has been mentioned in these posts.  I have decided not to toggle different settings on/off to test the effect on the battery because that defeats of having a "smartphone" and will seriously limit my ability to use the device as I have historically used it.  I will use my fully-charged, fully calibrated iPhone as I normally would and compare that to my iPhone 4 battery drain.  I started using beta versions of iOS5 on my iPhone 4 in July and did not notice any significant or anomalous battery drain issue.  If I notice that my battery drains excessively, I will exchange my iPhone 4S for a new one, to be able to eliminate that the issue is hardware related, which I doubt is the case, but I lose the ability to do an exchange/return with AT&T after 30 days.  If it turns out to be a software issue, then I will simply wait until Apple issues iOS 5.0.1 or whatever the iteration will be and that will correct the issue.  The good news is that Apple is aware of the issue (as documented on Cnet.com) and they will do right by the customer.

It seems like the issue lies more with IOS 5 rather than with the phone model itself.  I have the iphone4 and it is experiencing the same battery drain.  I have reset my network, turned off my location, turned off my ping, and am not allowing any notifications.  After doing that, I don't see any significant recovery in the amount of battery life.  I used to brag about how much time I had on my iphone.  It only started doing this after upgrading the SW.  Anyway, I would still rather have an Apple product than anything else.  I have worked for several companies (RIM, Motorola...) and this is still the best product out there!  We'll get it sorted! 

Battery life is really rediculous! I can only but join all users here, cause I got the same problem. I got my 4S yesterday (Switzerland) and all of Europe's iPhone 4S users are complaining. So this is a worldwide issue. I am thinking of returning the phone to Apple on Monday unless there will be some news indicating that this will be resolved.

Sorry Apple but this issue really s_u_c_k_s. It's actually worse than the "antenna-gate".

P.S.: I talked to Apple today and the support said that it could be iOS 5 that is causing the battery drain.

I had the same issue last night after reading what people were advising i decided to do a hard restore and it did the trick i have been on wifi for the past 2hr and used the phone (app store skype facebook....) for 30 min and i am only down 2 %.

I  literally took my phone off the charger about 10 minutes ago to update my rss feeds which took about 30 seconds, and browsed through them and found a link about the iPhone 4s and the terrible battery life. Just in that time my battery had already dipped to 96%.

SInce I first receive the phone, I noticed the battery issues. Being that I came from the iPhone 4 which had amazing battery life, the iPhone 4s is just terrible. I have followed many of the battery related fixes (ie turned off location based apps in settings, dim back light, fetch mail manually, etc). I have run tests at night where I charge completely to 100%, reboot the phone (to make sure no programs are running in the back ground) and let the phone sit untouch over night, and after 6 hours the phone would be down by 17 - 25%.  I did this test several times on different iPhone 4s' (3 of them), so I know it was not just one bad phone. I did notice that the phones with the blue color screen (my preference for display) seem to have slightly lower battery performance than the yellow screens (which I can't stand to look at), but this may have just been noise in my testing results.

After enabling and disabling different features of the phone, disabling the cellular data made the biggest difference. Running the phone with everything enabled except iCloud and cellular data, my phone was able to only loose 7% over night.  It seems strange to me that when I have wifi enabled and cellular data turned on, that it would drain the battery that much extra since all data should be going through WiFi anyway, but based on that test, even if wifi is on and connected, it appears that cellular data is still active. Has anyone else seen this?

I charged up fully last weekend before going out. Took some pictures, sent a couple of texts and downloaded a couple of apps over 3G. This is with most notifications/bluetooth/ping/location services turned off. The battery was at 60%, down from 100% after about an hour or so of usage.

I always have the phone on charge overnight and take it with me to work. It's on standby for most of the day, the only push notifications I have enabled are an eBay app, messages, viber & whatsapp. By the time I get home in the evening after about 30 mins of light usage during the day, the battery is sometimes in the 40-50% range. Not good at all for 9 hours or so of standby and barely 30 minutes of light usage with Wi-Fi off

Have you also disabled the system services in location services?

In my case disabling Setting Time Zone improved my battery life.

Pretty much agree. Went from 3GS to 4S, and very poor battery life:

• Good signal coverage
• <30 mins of phone usage
• Shut down all background apps
• Used only for email

LIfe is less than 1/2 a day. I am now carrying a charger with me and charging during the day.

Worst battery life of any iPhone I've had:

• iPhone bought opening month in '07
• iPhone 3GS bought opening month of 3GS in '09
• iPhone 4S, ordered online for initial lauch '11

Also suffering from rapid battery drop.  If I don't charge my 4S every night I'm dead in the wayer.  It charges to 100% - I take it off the charger and 10 minutes later it's at 99% and dropping.  WiFi sync dropped it 10%.  I hope there's a fix soon!

casey, I just got off the phone with apple and I told them all I have done and their response was to bring it in and exchange for a new one. so i'm on my way. but thanks for the help. by the way, mine is an iPhone 4 and i use iCloud and I have a gmail account for work along with my mac account.  what was your suggestion? im curious?

While not as good as the iPhone 4, this tremendously helped both my girlfriend and I's battery life:

Turn off Facebook PUSH. This can be found under Settings -> Facebook. Note: This is not the notifications, but the individual push settings from the app itself.

Turn off Reminders & Calendar NOTIFICATIONS.

Standby is perfect now, but usage still varies.