Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Casey, I've moved from Exchange to iCloud. In the absence of receiving new calendar invites and appointment reminders, I have yet to see any thing in my new Exchange setup that indicates a problem.

Since I can't get the phone to Fed Ex tomorrow, I'm going to see if I can really push it and used it as close to normal as possible.

I'll keep you posted.

jnewell wrote:

 

Was it a PITA?  No, it was a PITFA.  Actually, a BFPITFA.

Going through that right now. I concur.

The battery life is just ridiculous! I had my phone on standby for only about 4 hours this morning, only using it for a few minutes on Yelp, and after the 4 hours, I had half my battery drained. I miss the battery life on my 4 (never thought I'd say that). My only change in settings from my 4 is the notification center and Siri. But I feel like it really shouldn't be that much of a difference in battery life... especially on standby.

I'm highly considering going back to my 4.

Add me to the list - battery life is terrible.

Everything is turned off and get about 20 -24 hours of stand-by from a full charge.

The iPhone 4S is my first Apple product

ya ive been haveing problems with mine to.

Hi Guys,

Note the following:

The Guardian quotes Oliver Haslam, of iDownloadBlog:

It appears that iOS 5?s GM release introduced a bug that causes the Setting Time Zone function to keep the location tracking circuitry running constantly, draining battery power considerably. Switching it off may mean that your iPhone will no longer set its own time zone when you travel, but that's a small price to pay for having your iPhone last more than 12 hours on a full charge...We have tested this method on 4 different iPhone 4S handsets, including aniPhone 4 and aniPhone 3GS. All have reported drastically improved battery life after switching "Setting Time Zone" off.

I don't know if someone else has mentioned this already, but I think that I have solved my battery problems. As some have suggested, if you set your iPhone up entirely as a new device and restore none of your backups to it, you should probably be all right. However, if, like me, you would rather not lose all of your SMS/iMessages, call history, favorites, and other VPN/WiFi settings, and have upgraded from a prior iPhone, there is an alternative.

I went into the Genius Bar today to talk to one of the techs. He suggested the full restore without using a backup to set everything back up. When pressed further (and I mean it that it took me another three or four times of asking the question in slightly different ways, always reemphasizing the fact that I didn't want to lose some key information), he offered an alternative.

If you go select Settings -> General -> Reset -> Reset All Settings, then your iPhone will reset all of your system settings to the defaults and may make you lose some of the settings for some of your apps. When I did it, I lost the settings on a VOIP app, so it was relatively trivial to reconfigure it. I also had iTunes Match show up as an option, something that wasn't there before.

Long story short, I went from 10% battery usage an hour to 1% in 1.5 hours. I am now at 99% battery remaining after an hour-and-a-half.

As an aside, the tech also suggested backing up to iCloud and then restoring from that backup, which will retain the important settings/data that I wanted, but "scrubs" the settings when getting backed up, so that when you restore from that backup, you should be without any of the corrupted settings files that are causing apps to crash and stay in memory (which seems to have been my problem). In order to accomplish this, you may have to remove the pictures from your phone, as those are included in your backup storage needs.

I hope this helps someone!!

Here are my stats for today.:

From 100% battery life to 5% -

- usage: 4 hours 30 minutes

- standby: 19 hours 1 minute.

I've had 3 full charges since I bought the phone - total lifetime cell calling: 3 hours and 46 minutes.

This seems way off from where it should be.

CORRECTION!!!

Hi Guys,

Note the following:

The Guardian quotes Oliver Haslam, of iDownloadBlog:

It appears that iOS 5?s GM release introduced a bug that causes the Setting Time Zone function to keep the location tracking circuitry running constantly, draining battery power considerably. Switching it off may mean that your iPhone will no longer set its own time zone when you travel, but that's a small price to pay for having your iPhone last more than 12 hours on a full charge...We have tested this method on 4 different iPhone 4S handsets, including aniPhone 4 and aniPhone 3GS. All have reported drastically improved battery life after switching "Setting Time Zone" off.

"Setting Time Zone" is found under Settings/Location Services/System Services.

These things like time zone and notifications help, but do not solve the problem.  Sure hope Apple can fix it, and do it soon!

This thread was started almost 15 days ago. It contains almost 2000 posts on 130 pages. There's more than 125 000 views. There are other threads. There's not one confirmed Apple employee posting a single thing in it. Not one post or acknowledgement. And I used to make fun of RIM no later than a week ago. But I think it's becoming clear that there is no issue whatsoever here: this device, with IOS5, is really a sub-48 or even 24hrs usage device and that's it if not used in a stoic way. You wanted to submit to people entirely controlling your experience? Well, they've simply decided that it was to be a great, albeit short before charge, experience. Just think different! Short but sweet! Better than 2.5 days of BB or Android right? Sorry folks, I've joined the dark side today. But I've also bought an Ipod Touch, because that's what the 4S is without 3G and all - a 300$ device with no contract.

Usage 2 Hours, 31 Minutes

Standby 1 Day, 0 Hours

Battery percentage 55%

Changes made throughout the day to get to...

Exchange enabled (with push)

iCloud enabled (with push) for contacts and calendars

OFF:

Siri

Location services

Default Notifications:

Weather Widget

Phone

Messages

Reminders

Calendar

Game Center

Stock Widget

Totally agree here mate.. I tried a couple of things including turning off time zone location tracking.. And a few others none of them did a thing.. I fully charged and did as you have said and reset all settings I have now been using the phone for 15 minutes full usage using Siri emails full web browsing Facebook and only now have I dropped 1% still a little early but by the looks of it this advice has worked perfectly. Everything is turned on. 1 thing I noticed was default settings have brightness set at half.. Still after writing all of this I'm in 99% 20 minutes later.. Thank you. I didnt have any big issues before but this certainly improved the drain..

And ... if it's helpful to anyone, here is the aggregated crash log from today:

Crash Log aggregated 2011-10-29

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2011-10-29T00:00:00Z

I think for me, the mystery usage during standby (45 min over the course of a work day, likely causing the battery drain of 15%) may turn out to be sync'ing documents and data with the cloud.  Another user posted that he turned his off and things were great.  I turned of the use cellular data if not on wifi and my standby only dropped 1-2% at the end of what would be a work day (I also turned of wifi, though, to simulate what would have been the situation at work).  I'm going to try to turn off the whole thing this time, though I'm pretty happy with the last result. 

Previously I'd tried essentially everything else that was mentioned, including time zone (that wasn't the problem), ping, deleting email accounts and resetting networks, turning off as many notifications as I could stomach, killing visible backgrounded apps, etc, etc and only today did I get a good result during standby (doing no work on the phone at all).  The only thing I didn't do is a DFU type restore.

Kudos to the fellow who posted this tweak earlier (he used a CPU monitor, though the one I used didn't really indicate a difference during the short time I was monitoring; I probably should have used the one he did).  Hopefully others will notice a difference too.

What I'd recommend people do is don't use the phone at all for the day.  Kill background apps in the morning and check your usage and clear any celluar data that was sent.  Then, having left the phone on standby, check in the evening to see how much mystery usage was going on and how much was cellular data.