Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Please ensure when u backup ur old settings to the iPhone old mail account passwords are not backed up.

There is a possibility that either having no password or a wrong password causes the phone to try over and over again.

Key in passwords into all mail accounts and disable push fetching, unless apple releases a patch.

I'm enjoying this thread, comedy gold. I'll just wait until the obvious 5.0 teething problems are sorted for 5.01, then buy the new phone, instead of trying to get it before everyone else. I suppose you just enjoy the excitement.

Like everyone else here - noticing a huge difference in the battery life of my iphone 4s vs my previous iphone 4. Have attemped disabling almost all of the location services, reduced my mail settings, brightness, opened apps etc, but I still get less than one day out of the battery. Hope this can be fixed with an update!

Just logged on here for  first time.

Want to second your comments on poor batterylife of 4S.

I'm not a big user but I'm down  about 40% every night when I recharge overnight.

Jeez... imagine playing with the phone on a  flight and finding out you can't use the phone whe you arrive at the airport terminal.

two things i did.

1. if you aren't using bluetooth or wifi, turn them off until you need them.

2.  i also took my phone to the apple store and they did a firmware/software reset and it helped alot.

     be sure to backup your settings because it will wipe them out.  they will restore through either iCloud or iTunes (conacts/info)  you will have to manually reset your mail settings if you are using a third party server.  hope that helps.

Had the same issues and tried everything including factory restore. 

The fix for me was to DISABLE THE CALENDAR NOTIFICATION.

Having the same problem- I have an iPhone 4 and since downloading the iOS5 software my battery life has been very poor.Yesterday I had a fully charged phone at 7am by 11am it had already gone down to 38% on standby. I've been losing 15%/hr on standby. Before the iOS5 updated I could have my phone on standby for a couple days without needing to recharge my phone. I have had to switch off Push notifications, removed multiple apps from the Notification Centre, turned off Location Services, changed my alternative emails addresses to Fetch, Bluetooth and Ping off, and I keep removing apps from the Multitasking Bar. It seems to have solved the problem (for now, down only 5% in 3 hours on standby), but it seems ridiculous to have all these great features that drain your battery life.

I went to the Apple Store in my city yesterday for an unrelated issue and had the Genius adjust some settings after telling him about the poor battery life.  It hasn't helped; this 4S battery is the worst I've had on any smartphone I've owned, albeit this one is much more sophisticated.

I went the Apple store yesterday, where they did a reset.  Then restored from icloud back up.  Big improvement.  Instead of losing 30% + overnight, last night it only lost 4%.  That's with wi-fi, and a few more location finding apps turned back on.  "Genius" claimed the issue seems to have something to do with activating the phone from an existing back up, instead of as new.

In reading all these issues, I'm noticing a lot of the same problems with battery drain on my 4s. I have done the things suggested, turned off a lot of the GPS functions, and other energy saving features but in under two hours of usage that consisted of a 5 minute phone call, maybe 5 minutes of reading email and responding to one. My phone is currently at 82% charge. I upgraded from a 3Gs and the power drain on the 4s seems to be much greater than the previous model I was using. To have to jump through so many hoops to try and gain some extra battery life, makes the phone a huge inconvenience. Apple please do something to the software to help with the battery drain. At this rate, I won't have any charge left in my phone for my evening commute home from the office.

Scarface. wrote:

 

My iPhone 4s battery seems terrible! Almost equivalent to my 3GS and it's terrible battery life. When I got my iPhone yesterday and restored from backup I noticed nothing really changed with minimal usage and standby! Is this normal or should I consider setting it up as a new phone because maybe something is running in the background that's causing it to drop a percentage every few minutes under light usage? Input would be great!

Another post about battery drain issue:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2395559,00.asp#fbid=oQ3v30zsykw

I have been able to solve my iphone 4S battery issue on two separate occasions now.  In both cases, my phone was losing about 15% charge per hour, even when idle.   Phone also would become noticably hot at times.  I had the issue when I first got the phone, and again yesterday.  All of the notification and location disabling/resetting mentioned in this thread did not work.  Doing a full wipe and restore did not work.  What has worked twice now was to delete my 2 exchange accounts, restart the phone, and re-add them.  There must be a glitch in the sync where it gets caught in a loop and the phone does not ever go to sleep.  I never had this issue for the past 2 years with my 3GS.  Only with my new 4S.  I hope Apple figures out what it is, otherwise I will have to keep doing this periodically and hope the long-term battery life is not being affected.

I have had the 4s for 6 days now and have the phone set the following way:

Wi-Fi:                         Off at work; On at home

Personal Hotspot:        Off all the time (don't need it)

Notifications:               Turned on Weather, Mail, Messages, Reminders, Calendar

Locations Services:      On; Map widget is enabled for location

Systems Services:       All Off

Brightness:                  30-40% with Auto On

General>Network:        Cell data Off (don't need it all the time)

General>Bluetooth:      Off (don't use it much)

General>Restrictions:   Ping turned Off

iCloud:                         Not currently setup

Mail, Contacts, etc:      One email account setup for fetch hourly; push is Off; calendars are not synched

Multitasking tray:  Generally clear-maybe one or two apps running.

Usage Time:     3 hours 59 minutes

Standby Time:  14 hours 39 minutes

TOTAL TIME:    18 hours 38 minutes 

Battery:            49%

Battery seems to drain at the rate of 1% for every 4-5 minutes when actively using the phone to do something.  Standby drain (for me) is about 0.95-1.0% per hour.

Based on the standby numbers I could potentially get approx. 100 hours of standby time, or 8.5 hours of "mixed-use" time.

I have had the Personal Hotspot menu item gray out randomly on occasion, suggesting that something in the operating system isn't communicating properly.  My impression is that the excessive battery drain issues people are experience, whether during standby or with light to moderate use, is related to the system settings/operating system of the phone. 

The phone does get warm with use though; especially when using cellular data or playing games.

Message was edited by: Unshaven

Still struggling with 4S Battery drain on the wife's phone... I have a 4 with iOS5 that is performing at the same battery rate before/after the system upgrade. The wife's phone is drained of battery after 7 hours with normal usage. I've disabled the location services for Time Zone as some have suggested, and have drained down/recharged to full several times but no real improvement.