Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

*Update...

Quick rundown: iPhone 4S, 32gb, AT&T, new sim card when I purchased the phone. Battery was crap...

So I turned almost everything off like most have and the battery was still draining pretty quickly. Last night I erased my phone to factory settings and restored through iTunes backup stored on my laptop. So far the phone is holding more of a charge, but was still draining rather quickly for an electronic device.

One thing i missed completely which i don't know how, I had about 7 different calendars on my phone being synced with iCloud from my MacBook. I still don't understand how i even had that many on my laptop. Anyway's, I erased all of them and kept one.

So far its holding a charge rather well, and I'm using wi-fi and location services are turned on.

This is my phone setup for those who'd like to double check their's:

Airplane Mode > Off

Wi-Fi > ON (well now I've been able to leave it on, turn it off for now though)

Notifications > Sort Manually (in Notification Center only Phone and Messages, Not in Notification Center everything else)

Location Services > Maps, Siri, Weather, and Find my iPhone ON. Everything else OFF

Sounds > No Changes

Brightness > Kept at a minimal level, Auto-Brightness OFF

General

Siri > OFF

Network > Cellular Data ON, Data Roaming OFF, VPN OFF

Bluetooth > OFF

iTunes wi-fi sync > OFF

Spotlight Search > everything has been unchecked

Auto-Lock > 1 Minute

Restrictions > On > Ping OFF

iCloud > Contacts, Notes, Documents & Data, Find My iPhone ON, everything else OFF

Storage and Backup > iCloud Backup ON

Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Calendars -Time Zone Support OFF

Facetime > ON

Safari > No changes

Messages > iMessage ON

Music > iTunes Match OFF, EQ OFF

Photos > Photo Stream OFF

Store > Everything OFF

I will continue making changes and turning on items that i would like to consistently have turned on.

But this is what has helped me so far. Next i will drain the battery out to 0% then charge it back up to 100% and update you guys again.

iPhone 4S / Black / 64 GB / Verizon / Maryland, USA / Pre-ordered 0310 10/7 and received on launch day.

Add me to the list of eager early adopters now disillusioned by the abysmal battery performance. Before I begin; an anecdotal note from yesterday at the point where I started seriously considering bailing from iPhone and going back to the Android "devil I know":

Me to Siri: "Why does my new iPhone 4S have such poor battery performance?"

Siri: "That's a good question."

Me: "Thank you"

Siri: "Why, My Precious, that was nice of you to say."

I am a first-time iPhone owner and so my phone was set up and activated as a new phone. I dove right in and hooked up to iTunes on my iMac and sync'd up. I enabled iCloud, Find My Phone, Photo Streaming, etc. Coming from the Droid, my "cloud" is Google for mail, contacts and calendars, and so I followed Verizons instructions and set up my GMail as an Exchange account with full syncing. Siri and (now borderline jealeous girlfriend) spent the next day at the MD Reniassance Festival. The phone had a full charge at 8:30 AM. By lunch time I noticed that the battery was down to 50% or less, but I attributed it to all the pics and one 3 minute video and basically being in the "playing with the new toy" mode. By the time we left around 5:00 PM the battery was probably pushing 20%.

A few days later I had to accept there was a problem. I left the phone in the car at 8:00 AM (not permitted to bring it inside due to security restrictions) when I went in to work. I returned to the car at 1:30 PM to find that it had dropped from 95% to 65%. That works out to ~5.5%/hr doing nothing but laying around in standby mode.

The short of it is this: since then I have read countless forum posts and tried countless remedies, and I have finally got to the point where it only loses about 1% / hour on stand-by. I don't think that's stellar, but it's a vast improvement over 5.5%/hour. Of course that's with turn most non-essential features OFF, which as many posters have pointed out, and I agree, is unacceptable for an Apple product. I am now leaving WiFi and Bluetooth ON, with about the same 1%/hr drain on stand-by.

HOWEVER, nothing has changed insofar as my usage experience. (I did after-all buy the phone to USE it) Basically as soon as I pick up the phone and start using it, the battery really starts to drain. I'm not doing processor or data intensive things. All I have to do is send a few texts, surf a few web sites, check-in to Foursquare, and make a move in Word Feud, and I can practically watch the %charge number tick down.

Surely this can't be right. I point that out because it seems that most posters seam to be focusing more on the high discharge rate when on standby, but once that's "resolved" the implication is the battery holds up acceptably while they're using the phone.

So I guess I'm starting to wonder if there are two main classes of this battery issue: Those that drain the battery because they keep "doing stuff" when on standby, and those that discharge the battery excessively whenever they're legitimately in use.

Is it just me, or are there others who got past the standby drain but still can barely get through a day because the charge gauge drops like a stone during even the lightest type of use?

In my first forum post regarding this issue, I stated that my freshly restored iPhone 4s had used up 16% of battery in 7 hours. The iPhone was in phone only mode. Meaning that every function that the iPhone has was turned off, apart from having a SIM card in and having mobile data enabled. Wifi, Siri, location services etc were all disabled. No accounts were set up.

I've just repeated that process with a completely different SIM card inserted that came with the iPhone 4s and the battery didn't even drop 1% in 1 hour.

This means that the SIM card I have from my old iPhone 4 has issues with the iPhone 4s.

I've just switched on all of the main functions of the iPhone 4s (Siri, location services, wifi), I've not added any exchange or iCloud accounts yet. I'll see how that goes.

Yay

4S Folks,

FINALLY the weak battery case is made public. Look at the CNN link below from today. #2 issue with iPhone 4S is weak battery.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/19/tech/mobile/iphone-4s-problems/index.html

I hope APPLE takes this seriously & turn around a fix ASAP, like in the coming couple of weeks before our return period passes. More the number of people call APPLE support & log in a complaint, better is the chance of this issue getting fixed ASAP. SO PLEASE TAKE 10MINs TO CALL APPLE AND LOG YOUR COMPLAINT AND GET A NUMBER.

First time iPhone buyer from UK here.  Love the phone except the battery.  I simply refuse to pay this much for a phone and 'turn off' features which are the reason I bought the phone in the first place.

I'm keeping faith that an update/fix will be released soon ...

I'm on sprint and having the same issues. Has anyone noticed if having their phone exchanged has made any difference? I'm going to the genius bar tomorrow. But I'm not interested in a new phone if it's the same thing and this is a software not a battery issue. Which honestly seems to be the only possible explanation. I cant imagine apple put out millions of phones with bad batteries as it seems to be the case of u are following this forum and news as well. CNN and yahoo tech both have articles about battery life issues with the 4s

Here's my update after another 4 hours of usage.

Previous posts for reference:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16441255#16441255

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16444024#16444024

https://discussions.apple.com/message/16450079#16450079

So it's been 4 hours since I added my email accounts *without* calendars. I've had wifi on the whole time. Made 15 minutes of phone calls, 20 txts or so, and about 10 emails. My iCloud account is on and active, as well as my exhange email and gmail account. I have Push on, and fetch set to 30 minutes. I still have no other apps installed. Time zone support is off by default.

93%-74% -  Drain rate of about 5% an hour. If I could mantain this battery drain speed, I would be happy. But on the flip side, if the root of my problems is still calendars like I suspect it is, then it's going to be very annoying to get through a work day without it. I might have to look for a calendar app that isn't fetching data from the built-in calendar so that I can leave the calendars off in the mail settings. Next step is to sync my phone with my computer tonight for the first time since I did a factory reset. I will be putting my apps, music, and photos back on. I will only do this by syncing and not by restoring from backup.

Thanks for reading, will continue to update.

Update:

Quick rundown.

1) iPhone 4S, 32gb, AT&T, new SIM card when I purchased the phone. Battery was absolutely horrible.  Dropped 10% just playing with the settings in the first 30 of using it.  The phone kept getting hot.

2) Went to Genius Bar on Day 2.  They directed me to Restore the phone as New to eradicate any corrupted files.  I did so, and this did not help.  I tried literally every suggestion on this thread and nothing seemed to help significantly.

3) Returned to the Genius Bar and they replaced the phone, using the same SIM card.    I got home and the problem was actually slightly worse.  I restored the phone as new, and tried the suggestions on this thread.  The only thing that helped noticeably, but not sufficiently, was turning off the calendar function in my exchange account.

4) Today, while checking email periodically during a boring meeting at work, my phone dropped 12% in 30 minutes.

5) I have another Genius Bar appointment for this weekend.  I am going to ask for a new phone AND a new SIM card.  If that does not work, I am returning the phone and waiting for the Android Razr.

Stop posting nonsensical replies about your battery losing x% in 1 hour. This is not how batteries work. For those complaining, do a few 100% fully charged and deplete the battery to 0%. Do this a number of times, then time the battery usage (from 100% to 0% if you want to compare with Apples golden number).

Can I use the SIM from my "old" iPhone 4 instead of the one that came with the 4s?

dekz wrote:

 

Stop posting nonsensical replies about your battery losing x% in 1 hour. This is not how batteries work. For those complaining, do a few 100% fully charged and deplete the battery to 0%. Do this a number of times, then time the battery usage (from 100% to 0% if you want to compare with Apples golden number).

Trolls gonna troll

My battery was losing 50 Amps/hour.  JK

But seriously,  battery went from full charge to 50% over 3 hours.  After I found this post, disabled the calendar in all email accounts and it seems to be better over the last two hours.

64GB Black

ATT

Restored from IOS 4 backup.

Sorry, is this post also aimed towards the posts I've been making?

Im on Sprint

Chris Mearing wrote:

 

Sorry, is this post also aimed towards the posts I've been making?

Who cares. We'll keep doing what we're doing, if it helps someone great, if not at least we're putting more information out than apple is. Don't let him derail the thread.