Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I am on Verizon and finding my iPhone 4s is worse than the iPhone 4 I had, also on Verizon.

I've seen a lot of suggestions here, and I tried most of them.  To be sure, I have witnessed automatic time zone setting grabbing GPS and not releasing, so I have it off.  I also have bluetooth off, and I have also experimented with some of these other suggestions, none with much impact.

However, while looking into iCloud, I noted the following under Settings > General > iCloud > Storage & Backup:

If you look at this, it is clear that the phone thinks it has a restore session in progress, even though it didn't.  However, there was none, and it stayed in this state for more than two hours, even across a shutdown and restart.

I got sick of it, so I chose to go ahaead and cancel the restore it thought it had going on.

I then toggled iCloud backup off, being carefull to keep all of my information on the phone at each of the prompts that followed.

After this, I toggled iCloud backups back on, and had it merge each time I was prompted.  I then had it perform a backup, which left me here:

After doing this, you can see my usage and battery percentage below:

This is the best I have seen in this forum, and its in line with what I would have expected.  6 hours of usage and 37% remaining battery is quite acceptable.

I don't know if this will fix anything for any of you.  However, I suggest you check to see if you, too, have any backups in some stuck state.  I could easily see how a hung process like this could prevent the OS from entering a low power state.

Let me know if this helps anyone.

Emptying the battery completely and then charging it completely worked for me.

Well I have an iPhone 4s and my wife has an iPhone 4 and the battery drains a lot quicker after iOS 5 soi am unsure as to bring it to an apple store because I'm hoping it's a software issue

Well, for me, it does not seem to be the document synchronization to iCloud after all. Again after coming home from work with out using the phone at all, there was 30 minutes of unexplained usage and a battery drain of 10%. When I looked at my phone just now, the compass calibration was inexplicably on and I cannot turn it off short of going into the settings area and turning off location services for the compass calibration itself.  I think the next step for me is going to be a DFU restore.

Hey Guys,

I find this whole battery issue very surprising. I had a 3GS (which has a bad battery life) and recently upgraded to the 4s.  I've had no battery issues at all.  My battery is lasting the entire day  and if I don't use it too much, it will last well into the night.  I do have to charge it every night, but that's a non issue for me.  I'm shocked to read about all these battery issues.  Do you think it was just a bad crop of 4Ss? 

I too have an app that is showing 50-70% CPU load all the time even with everything turned off.  Memory is always over 40% used at all times as well.  

Something new happened today too...location icon came up without any apps on, and wouldn't go off.

Just to follow up about my battery life here has been the progress all day for me which includes normal use (wifi browsing, push email, music, 3G browsing, Siri, text, phone etc)

What I did is listed one the post i made on page 167. Hope this helps others also!

It has been proven that the problem is not the battery capacity itself; it is its display which is flawed. I'm talking about the battery percentage display on the top right of your screen. If you allow your iPhone 4S to fully drain out, you will notice that it stays on 1 % for a very long time, up to an hour, depending on your usage. Let it then charge without any usage for 2-3 hours until it reaches 100 % (in addition, trickle charge is recommended, for those of you who do have the right apps). This should improve your battery life dramatically until the next Apple software update.

So there is a problem with the calculation of the iPhone 4S battery percentage. Apple's algorithm within the phone doesn't fully "take into account" the time zone localization issue as well as the automatic iCloud backup. In other words, they messed up their calculations. A software update should do it. However, we've had this problem before with the antenna bars display, and one would really expect from Apple to learn from their mistakes. It's funny how the first updates after major iOS releases have something to do with Apple's miscalculations.

Your post made me think that maybe we should be looking more into what the numbers mean rather than their magnitude:

Assuming that Apple's specifications are supposed to be "normal", then a typical battery on the 4s will drain 0.5% every 1 hour of standby. So for your stats, we can assume your battery used about 6% on standby throughout the day (11/2, some rounding) and that 57% of the rest of the drain (94-37) was used on about 6 hours of real usage, meaning a drain of about 10% battery per 1 hour of use.

I crunched numbers from other screenshots and other users, and some trends are popping up....practically everyone is falling into a distinct group of what I'll call "10-15%ers" (they lose 10-15% of battery per hour of usage). Can anyone do BETTER or worse than this? Just something to think about...

Here's the formula if you had trouble following:

Look at your standby hours (round). Now divide by 2. This is your percent drain for standby alone. Deduct this number from 100. This new number is the amount of battery not used for standby at the moment. Subtract your current battery level from the number I just talked about in the previous line. Now go to find your actual usage hours. Now you can that number of hours to find out how much of that battery power used went for usage per hour.

I found that just turning my phone off for a hour and then charging it up fix my battery issues. I would suggest this if you havn't turned your phone off for a while. I had mine on for two weeks. Hope this helps.

Was getting a days full usage from 8am to 5/6pm with all suggested things off/on etc, still not good enough, so finally decided to do a restore of my 4s through itunes tonight. Set it up as new iphone, only synced contacts from address book and not google contacts as before and did not add any music or apps yet. Went to turn off location services (time zone etc) noticed 'cell networks search' is now missing as an option for whatever reason.

Only did this tonight, have apple changed the ios5 software slightly? Phone has just held 100% for the longest time since I have owned it. About to leave it to drain overnight and see what is left by morning.....

What do you mean by had yours "on" for 2 weeks? You mean you got 14 days for standby, with no usage?? With absolutely no charging in between 100 and 0?

i have the same issues with many others here and worldwide . seems like every fix is dirrerent to the invidual . for me , i use to have 45% remaining after a 12 hrs useage (with every posssible option turned on) .i have tried last night , turn off all my facebook automatic check  options . plug in the phone turn it off for charging. At 0730 this morning , use the phone the same way as i do everyday . after 11 hrs , it still have 73% remaing.

I am jumping to a conclusion that Apple needs to come up with a iso upgrade to solove these problem . why buy a product with all the nice goodies but you have to switch it off for the phone to function problemly . other than that , someone from apple supose to called me at 1pm and never did .