Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Thanks for posting. This is my first smartphone. I thought something was wrong with my battery draining power until I saw these posts. I charged it last night and the battery is at 50% before the work day is over. I haven't used it much and turn off some of the apps when I'm done just to try and save battery.

It's crazy to worry whether or not my phone charge will take me through a day! Apple needs to fix this or the smartphone features which caused me to buy the phone are pointless. I don't need this phone for work.

Ok, I have been tinkering with my settings on my iPhone 4 (not 4S) and have been having same battery drain issues since iOS update.  Things to note: I tried disabling 3G, location service time zone setting, terminating apps, disable wifi, disable wireless sync/backup, and power cycle.  None of these options seemed to help the constant 1-2% drain every couple minutes.

I then said screw it, and disabled location services completely.  Now my battery is still draining but about 1-2% every 5-10 minutes.  So although not a considerable increase in battery life, it does give a couple extra minutes to work with for now.

Back to work on settings, will keep you posted.

I have read through many replies and tried turning things on and off plus rebooting and various charging technics to no avail. I didn't realize how much is running in the background, if you believe as I did that once you go out of a app etc it closes down. If you double tap your menu button it shows what is running, mine had virtually every app running. Hold your finger on one of the apps until it gives you the - symbol and then close each one individually. Hope this helps

I haven't found any settings that fix my sucky battery life.  I do like this phone way more than my iphone 4, so I will take it for a while.  Please issue a fix soon!

I have the same battery issue on 4s mentioned in posts here. Battery drain 10% per hour with virtually no use. I have switched everything off (iCloud sync, use manual fetch for mail, removed everything from notification centre, turned of time zone, location services, no bluetooth, no diagnostics ). The listis so long that it's probably quicker to say what has been lest on and it still drains 10% or more an our. I can't get through the working day on a coup of emails, calls and a few web pages.  My old.3GS was better. I have also done a full factory reset/reinstall and no improvement.

Not sure if related but also visual voicemails don't get through unless I reboot the phone. I have reset the voicemail and still no visual voicemail when there are messages until I power down.

All in a bad experience and wished I stayed with my 3GS

In addition to my other post earlier today (Full discharge last night plugged in around 2am charged until 930something AM)

It's 7:54 PM and I am steadily losing about 5%-6% per hour with little or no usage.  I have even turned off the Extra, Extra locations features (iAds etc). 

I haven't played one game

I checked Facebook once

read about 50 emails (over 5 POP + 1 Exchange)

replied to none

sent/received about 20 texts.

4 incoming calls I didn't answer or check VM

2 outgoing not longer than 6 mins total

This is just one day.  So from 9:30ish AM to 7:59 PM (now) I have 48% battery left. 

It is a very interesting problem and supporting it is very complicated. It will be my last contribution. Yeah, I've said that before. I'm sure I will be sorely missed here lollll.

I've read at least half the posts in the thread, and, in my opinion, it's possible to theorize about what I would call "twofold 3G stress" i.e. internal/external. If all of this was just a 3G latency/persistence issue, then a fix would have been made available already and an Iphone 4 not S who has had prior good battery life can't all of a sudden have a battery hardware issue - plus the CPU is not the same as far as I know so it doesn't all of a sudden require more juice. But one could theorize that IOS5 3G implementation doesn't play along well with some of the carriers' equipment, down to some local components. This in turn may create stress (processing and eventually hardware) on the device and interfere with battery sensing, the indicator, and even charging. 3G can never be really turned off on the device. Software may just compound the issue (notifications and all that polling). It may be that by complete fluke some users have created conditions through tinkering that will allow for less stress, hence being able to entirely charge, calibrate and properly report battery usage. There may also be a random element to top it off. Most likely we'll never really know. Like for instance something random on the device, malformed user data or even somethings the carriers do randomly on their network. I wonder if deactivating the 3G in hardware then charging and using pure wifi would confirm or infirm my theory... well that's my take on it, not that it offers any real solution... lolll.

Good luck people!

I've pretty much got the same opinion as everyone else here, poor battery life no matter what settings you change. I can barely get through a day with the 4S, with the 4 on iOS 4 I would usually have 60% by the time I got home but now it's more like 20%, and that's with no push settings with mail, almost 0% brightness and without playing any games or using maps. In addition to this while I use safari to look up on some sites for a few minutes and maybe check my mail the phone will unnecessarily heat up like anything. I could probably fry an egg with it! It really is getting desperate and something surely needs to be done.

I hope a solution for everyone having battery problems comes soon.  In the meantime, note that the battery situation CAN be good.  For those who like graphs, here's what's happening on my phone.  I charged it two days ago and am approaching 48 hours of standby and am still above 40%.  Vertical scale = "Battery percent charge" and horizontal is "Standby time in hours":

Additional details are in my posting on page 179 of this thread.

All right, here's my latest. Battery was charged to 100% as of 12PM (PST) today. Between 12PM and 2PM, I only used location services for about a minute or two (after which I turned it off), sent a brief e-mail, read an e-mail reply, and otherwise it was on standby WITH 3G and Siri enabled and Wi-Fi off. E-mail push notifications set to "manual." At 2PM or so, it was still at 100%. Since then, I've read several e-mails, briefly checked Facebook, showed Siri off a little bit to a co-worker (some of which involved location services), and made one brief phone call--and 5 hours and 15 minutes after having been completely charged (it's now 5:15PM (PST)), I'm at 86%. (Between 2PM and 5:15PM, location services were activated for about 90 or so continuous minutes.) By the time I usually go to bed (at which time I always recharge), it usually varies between, say, 35%-75%, depending upon how much I've used it. I've only had the battery drained below 20% once or twice. (Keep in mind that I'm rarely talking on the phone for more than an hour or so a day, but there is often moderate to heavy app and Internet use, particularly on weekends.) It appears as if my iPhone is an anamoly in a good way. Since not all of the phones are having the same problem (although many of them are), I'm now really curious as to what's going on.

Hi, I had an iphone4 with ios 4.3 and now I have aniPhone 4S with IOS 5 and I have several problems with the battery, rarely I finish one day working with battery.

None of the listed recepies worked for me. I tried all of them. Either I disable everything on the phone, or I keep it plugged in. Either way, not very usefull and very disappointing. I regret switching from Blackberry to the 4S.

This represents a huge improvement over prior performance. Though I hope for a significant fix from Apple in the future, I am satisfied for the time being because I can get through a full day of typical use and I don't have to give up any of the features I want (I still have four, count 'em, four Exchange email accounts set to Push and all iCloud services turned on and set to Push).

My settings:

Location Services:

Diagnostics & Usage OFF

Location-Based iAds OFF

Setting Time Zone OFF

Traffic OFF

Restrictions:

Ping OFF

Brightness at about 50%; Auto-Brightness OFF

Wi-Fi always ON

Bluetooth always OFF

One thing I haven't done yet is a Full Cycle Charge with Battery Doctor Pro. Doing that tonight, and hopefully will see some further improvement.

maxpain, what the ____ are you talking about lol?

You have a misconception about what your usage and standby numbers mean. Standby shows the amount of time that passed from the moment you disconnected the phone from the outlet last time you charged it to 100%. Usage shows the amount of time OUT OF THE 5 hours of standby that you actually used your phone for a call/text/wifi/3G/whatever you use it for. These numbers are NOT to be added together and are NOT counting down to anything. Your usage is within specifications: your 5 hrs of standby is about a 3% drain, so the remainder of your battery that was used up (97-current86 = 11%) was used for your 1 hour of usage. Calls will kill 12.5% per hour, wifi kills 11% per hour, and 3G kills 17% per hour of internet browsing. So you are within the specifications, my friend.

Okay, I was very skeptical of the fixes but then I let the battery completely run out and then charged it 100% and I have seen strong improvement!!!! I also followed the "Location" fixes form page 167 and it has helped.  Prior to this the 4s would hold a long charge at both 1% or 100%, which made me think for a while that the meter was just off. But I still notice that the 4s charges really slowly-compaired with my 4 running IOS5.  I am coming around to the 4s though.  After one drain adn 100% recharge It's improved.  (One word of advice for any iphone: ALWAYS TRY TO RUN YOUR BATTERY AS FAR DOWN AS POSSIBLE BEFORE CHARGING. You don't need to obsess about this but an apple tech manager once told me how sensative phone batteries can be to charging memory in the long run. I do this when possible and never had any issues.)

Any way, I still expect an apple update that with simplify some of this....