Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

The 4S is my first smartphone.  I am lucky to get through 1.3 days of standby time with hardly any use.  I just assumed this was the norm for a smatphone.  If I use it much at all I can watch the percentage drop fairly quickly, both in browsing wifi, 3g, or playing games.  With use I am lucky to get through a day.  I miss the days of my plain phone and charging once every 6 days. 

Absolutely, for certain functions it is unacceptable to have to turn them off.  Part of the problem is that the phone comes with almost every function turned on, whether you actually need it or nto.  But try turning off the "raise to speak" option, seems to have worked for me.

there is something very wrong with the battery functionality on my 4s does not last more than 2 hours in standby before battery life hits less than 50%

why build a phone with so many cool features only to then have to turn them all off just have a phone to make calls.

my brand new iphone 64GB 4s is using around 6% per hour with nothing running  and no wifi. yesterday from 100% at 3PM by 11PM it was dead.

Siri location services disabled, Icloud disabled , Siri raise to face thing disabled.

I don't know what to do , seriously thinking about taking it back , except i gave my wife the iphone 4 ....

Mark

Your loss of 7% over 30 mins of web browsing is normal, though... if you're using wifi, you should lose about 5/6% over that half hour, if you're using 3G connection you should lose almost 9%.

Just to show the drain here is a small sample from the past 1/2 hour....

19:25 62% no wifi

19:52 59% no wifi

19:59 57% no wifi

shocking

this is standby , no browsing , doing nothing.

sean-g11, a 20 minute phone call (rounded up your 19 mins) should drain your battery by about 4%. Your 7 is a bit over, yes, but did you have something running in the background? like Safari, or a game, or a maps app, etc? something besides phone?

I'm seeing similar problems as what other are describing here. I first thought it might be the data corruption problem so I reset the phone and set it up as a new one rather than restoring from backup. Unfortunately that didn't help much.

As far as I can tell there's something up with the wifi in standby. I just reset the phone again and I basically have everything networking related turned off. iCloud is not set up, no mail, calendar, ... accounts. Push turned off. Location services off. Mobile data is off, wifi is on. And still I see battery dropping a percent every 30 minutes or so. If I completely turn off wifi then battery usage seems to be ok, dropping 5-10% over the course of a day.

On my old 3G the wifi would turn off when in standby and when the phone was unlocked it would take some time for the wifi icon to reappear in the status bar. On the 4S the wifi icon is always there when coming out of standby. Feels like somethings keeping the wifi active and eating up battery. As someone else suggested I'm going to try and see if the phone is producing any network traffic while in standby using wireshark...

ekimminau wrote:

 

I have 4 pop email accounts configured on my 4S. 2 were set for "Push" and 2 were set to "Fetch". I have changed all 4 to be configured as "Manual". I do not have Exchange and my batter life has been terrible. I will update in 24 hours.

FYI, just turning off Push will probably work. Check this out:

After having my new iPhone continually discharge in about 7 hours after I first set it up, I did the following:

• AutoBrightness is OFF
• Push for Exchange is OFF; Exchange and Gmail set to FETCH/15
• WiFi is OFF
• Bluetooth is OFF
• Data Roaming is OFF
• iCloud is OFF
• Siri Raise to Speak is OFF
• Location Services are ON, but
  • Find my iPhone is OFF
  • Location Services/System Services -- all OFF except Cell Network Search and Compass Calibration
• I generally have 4 bars with Verizon Network wherever I go

With those changes, iPhone battery usage seemed pretty normal — it would last for well over 20-30 hours in standby with a few hours of usage before a full discharge. I went to the Genius Bar, they said that "Push uses a lot of battery."

HOWEVER...my coworker has the same setup, AND DOES NOT have these problems at all. So, to troubleshoot, I did the following:

• Turned on Push for Exchange at at 3:10 pm when Battery Percentage was 71%. Usage reading then was Standby is 16 Hours, 10 Minutes. Turned off the screen. No apps are running in the background, not even mail. Let's see what happens...

• 3:43 pm - now it is at 62% with 2 Hours, 13 Minutes usage and 16 hours, 43 minutes standby. I have not picked up the phone since 3:10 pm, I've lost 8% battery life. It's obviously Push. I just turned it off. Thus, enabling push meant that the phone was "in use" for the 33 minutes that I had it sitting on my desk. Losing 8% in 33 minutes equates to a full discharge from 100% in about 6 hours and 52 minutes. That's about what I was getting before when I first set up the phone.

CONCLUSION: Push doesn’t work properly on my particular iPhone, or with my exchange account, because my co-worker’s phone is setup with Push and does not have this issue. So there's just something software-related in the way it interacts with my exchange account that simply kills the battery.

This, of course, should not be the case - my old Droid never had this problem - and I suspect Apple will find a fix. But the geniuses at the Genius Bar were no help this time. I'm going to go back and see if they can run diagnostics when push is enabled. I should have asked them to do that then.

Message was edited by: vlapira

Where do I find the diagnostics & usage data feature?

Thanks

what does turning icloud off have to do with it? Doesnt icloud only back up when your on wifi and tell it to?

I have the 64gb white and the battery life is terrible.  Drops about 10% overnight from 100% just sitting on the counter.  I made a few calls and listened to a little music at work and maybe 5 minutes on WIFI at lunc and I'm down to 30% before 4:00 pm.

My wife has the 4 with IOS and doesn't seem to have the issue, appears to be something with the 4S, not sure what.

Help Apple!?

Markfrombuck, can you grab your phone and double click the home button? Do a bunch of icons pop up? How many are in there, if any?

Something that has SIGNIFICANTLY affected my battery life was what's called "multitasking" - when you close out of an app or safari, or anything that you "opened", that app doesn't really close... it keeps running in the background in case you choose to open it up again. I started out with my phone losing 25% of power on standby over 6 hours, which was not normal. I called the Verizon store, who informed me about the multitasking thing. The guy who worked there is an owner of a 4s as well, and said that clearing that out dramatically improves things. Now my phone is within specs, so I highly recommend people double click that home button and take a look at what's running in the background, it's a tip that I am not seeing tossed around here that much. It gets burried in the pages and pages...

The first time I pulled up that tray to see what was running in the background, I had about 15-20 apps running at the same time. Touch one of them, hold down your finger on it, they will start wobbling and you can close them all.

Do you have Push on? It's been the culprit for me...