Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Just ran another test, switched off Find my iPhone, Photostream, Documents and Data sync and Fetch Hourly. Lost a 1% in 33 minutes. Don't know what's going on there.

I'm going to run 1 more test and then I've had enough of this.

i agree... my battery is back to normal, i turn iCloud on just to back-up once a day.

Turn on off all your mails acounts,gps, bluetooth, notifications, icloud, imessage, twiter, facebook, acounts, and turn on only cellular data and 3g. Charge your batteries till 100% at night. Unplug it from energy, reset your counters (cellular data and use), and go to sleep. When you wake up, go to see your counters.....

After conditioning my battery from approx 5% to full charge for the last 4 nights, I am finding a noticeable improvement.  However, this is with quite a few of the services switched off, which I should not have to do.

I am also running a 4 & 4S (both running iOS 5) side by side and the difference is still considerable.

After 4.5 hours of marginal use on each, the 4 is showing 90% charge and the 4S is showing 73%

If it was purely software, then surely both should be affected!

I am going to persevere for a few more days but I am bitterly disapointed with the performance to date.  If I can't rely on a phone to retain it's charge without having to turn of most of it's functionality and ration it's use, then there's not a lot of point in having it, regardless of how the specs have been upgraded.

I think I will be reverting back to my 4 if this issue isn't resolved soon.

Usually the first percentage drop from whenever you take it off the charger usually takes longer to drop than the second one.. For instance the other day.. i took my phone off the charger and it had 64%. It took it 18 minutes to drop to 63%.. and then from 63% to 62% it took 5 minutes. and then 4 minutes.. and stayed at 4 minutes for the rest of my test....

I set up a ticket with Apple about the indicator not saying 100%. He said it was the software - he suggested I try a restore or reset. I reset the phone. I ran down the phone to zero and let it shut off. I charged it overnight. When I awoke the phone was still at 98%. I left it charge a little while longer and then got the 100% charge. I have a black iphone 4s 32G. I notice now after having phone since Friday that battery life is much better. I have let the phone drain completely twice before trickle charging.

OK last post.

With a fresh restore and all iPhone 4s "features" enabled, including all Location services, SIRI, Exchange Account, Fetch data hourly. Also having the New SIM card inserted. The battery was holding at around 1% every 90 minutes.

I then enabled iCloud, and then the iPhone started eating power like nothing else. If you don't need to use it, then don't. Espeically turn off Find my iPhone, Docs and Data and Photostream.

Do a fresh restore and set up as a new phone. Don't set up iCloud though, it's a battery eater. Well at least it is for me.

I did notice that when i went into Maps and click the find my location button the blue dot was skipping around my location every 1/2 a second or so. So maybe the Find My iPhone service in iCloud is using GPS continuously.

Anyway, I'm done. Good Luck everyone.

Same here.  Got my new 4S that I charged for a whole day then installed the backup via iTunes from my 3GS, then updated some 46 apps over my home wifi. I took all the default options for everything.

No calls, no 3G and I'm down to 89% in about an hour, from full charge.  This is far, far worse than my 3GS.

What's going on?

I reset my network settings, turned my mail to fetch or manual, and went into location settings to turn of the GPS for both SIRI and in the system services for Location based iAds, Mobile Network Selection and Setting time zone. I then did a backup of the iphone onto iCloud, then restored from this backup.

Recharged it to 100% overnight, have used it for 20 mins (used siri several times and sent multiple text messages) and 1:13 on standby and have just gone down to 97% :) this is much much better than what it was before!!

Let me know if this helps anyone else!

I'd like to add my two cents on my battery drain issue as well.  I've noticed since I had the phone for three days now that the battery is not holding a charge near as well as my i4. I have most all my settings set as I did on my iPhone 4 but the moment I start using the phone i can watch the battery drain....I hope Apple has an update in the works to improve the battery!!!!! 

Don't know why, but all is well here.  I've run the 4S on WiFi for 24 hours and still have 41% left.  In the first 15 hours I played with the phone now and then, using Find My Friends for a hour, and with the following turned on for all 24:  GPS, iCloud (pushing contacts and calendar), an Exchange Server email acct. with Push, and with a POP email account set to manual/manual (see my other post in this thread). 

I have Time Zone support off (not sure if it matters), and compass on, and all other Location Services on.  WiFi syncing with iTunes is on, but the phone was not plugged into power so I suspect it did not sync.  Documents & Data are off as is the Diagnostics reporting.

I have not used cellular 3G at all during that period.  I was always on WiFi.

At 41% I may head out for today without charging and see what happens when I use 3G cellular.  Past troubles with POP email fetching led me to change to manual/manual -- that helped battery life on my old 3G iPhone.

Yesterday I ran my 4S and my wife's 3GS phone with the same usage and settings.  Battery usage dropped slowly and tracked each other almost perfectly.  I was at 50% after 14 hours.  Overnight with no usage (but turned on) it went from 50% to 41% in 9 hours.

To the earlier request for better descriptions, my iP4S 16GB is with AT&T. I have Exchange mail and calendars but those are critical to my work. I have closely down much of what has been recommended here, but have not restored the phone as new [I did this with the iP4 one time and it did not help).

I have not kept detailed notes but noticed one day that I started with 92% and was at 37% 12 hours later with very light use like short calls, email but no video, tv, etc.

My iPad 3G has the same configuration but not the battery drain. The iP4 passed on to my SO has much of what I have including Exchange mail and calendar, but the iP4 holds its charge much better through the day.

I talked with an Apple technician yesterday. They think that it could be a bad batch of phones (the same happened a few years ago with Blackberry). My friend has the same as mine (32GB) and it is not having any problems with the battery. I am going to the store today to test the battery. I am also having problems making and receiving calls.

I was also surprised to see that the actual capability of the 32 GB is 28GB (are you kidding me?????).

It is definitely worth calibrating/conditioning your battery multiple times by running it until the screen goes completely black and then recharging it to 100%. The full drawdown (and not just draining the battery to the 20% level) makes a big difference.

My 32Gb black 4s ran to 20% in two hours on the first day. So  I calibrated the battery once by drawing it down to screenblack and began shutting things off and disabling/re-enabling/resetting services just as everyone in this thread has done and the battery life improved to 4 hours of use and 25 hours of standby which is still not close enough to spec for me.

So I calibrated again, and, in the process of draining the battery, manage to watch more than 45 minutes of a 720p movie with the battery indicator at 1% which suggests that the phone hasn't yet figured out what a normal current drawdown looks like. After two full calibrations, I'm not done drawing the battery down yet, but it appears initially that it will last significantly longer than the last battery cycle

Thing is, faulty battery calibration could result from either an iOS5 bug or a hardware bug or a random synergy between the two and it would also explain why not every new phone is affected as well as why not every upgraded iPhone 4 is affected.  It also has explained why random battery drain has appeared as a bug for a significant number of users of past upgrade cycles.

The OS itself is using up some of your storage capacity so you'll never have the entire space (16g or 32g) available to you. That's fairly normal.

I'm interested to see what the store has to say when you go though. Post back after your visit. I'm not entirely pleased with my batt life either but if I'm not mistaken, I went through a similar thing with the newly released iP4. It needed a few iOS updates to get the batt life to stabilize.