Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

This is a rush job to show to Steve i guess.... but this will make him feel ashame !

I tried almost every option in all the articles and on the forums, and nothing seemed to be effective in truly helping stop the battery loss.  Then, I followed the advice of someone who posted that the battery should be drained entirely until the iphone shuts off completely.  I ran through this cycle twice over the past three days in following those instructions.  I also removed the case from my phone (which seemed to be affecting my reception somewhat).  With these two actions, my phone has improved pretty significantly, especially in standby.  When I do stuff on it such as navigate screens and open up apps that hit the network, it still drains fairly quickly -- about a percent every 4-5 minutes.  I still feel this is abnormal because my ipod touch never experienced this level of loss, even on iOS 5.  My results today far outpace my results a couple days ago.  Don't get too overly excited about my usage... I mostly listened to music today.  But, I definitely can see a measurable improvement.  I'm hoping for even more.

Model:  iphone 4s 64GB

Carrier:  Sprint

City:  Raleigh, NC -- signal is moderately good here

Phone setup:  I setup from a backup of another iphone 4s (which I had returned in disgust with the battery), and that iphone 4s had been setup as new. 

Apps:  I have about 300 of them...

Same here. I bought 2 of 4S (16G) black and white. My wife takes the white and her 4S has no problem at all. My black one drained fast, about 10% per hour.

First attemp, I tried to set up everything like her white 4S. That didn't work out. My phone still ran down 10% every hour passed. Note that my wife disable only some features like calendar notification, her location service is on.

Second(/third/fourth and so on) attemp, I followed whatever suggested in here eg. disable the Location Service, iCloud and whatever I could disable them. My black 4S is still drained fast as it is.

What I notice is that my wife iPhone has very low Usage. It looks like the usage time is equal to what she actually uses (approximately 2hr and a half of usage) and her phone can stand by for a day and a half. While my black 4S has Usage about a bit over half of Stand By Time. My one never last longer than 15hr so far.

In other words, same setting but the phones behaves differently (Usage/Stand By).

City: Melbourne, Australia

Message was edited by: Raoh

I too have horrible battery life.  On top of that the car charger that worked fine on my 3GS seems to only work intermitently on my 4S.

Wow -- I'd love to know if this claim about white iphone 4s vs. black one has any merit.  I've had two black ones so far, and they were both terrible.

I keep wondering in the back of my head -- is it possible that the issue is hardware and that there is a bad manufacturing batch out there?

I bought the 4s from Verizon the day it came out and noticed the battery issue right away. I applied just about all the fixes posted here and did notice some improvement. I wanted a lot of the options that these fixes suggested I turn off (push email, iCloud, calendar notifications, leaving bluetooth on, and leaving wifi turned on - I use the last two driving to work and at work). Very similar to my iPhone 4.  I also do a lot of book reading, and listening to music and audible books.

I finally took the phone to my local Apple store and they replaced it. Usually I have good response from the people at the store. My experience was a little different last night, the technician who replaced my phone could not get it activated. He replaced the SIM card, called Verizon and still could not activate it. (He was very nice and spent a lot of time trying, but........) He suggested I take it to my Verizon store (Middletown DE) to get them to activate it. The person at Verizon (who was very patient and extremely helpful) took about a half an hour to finally get it to activate. He said the person at the Apple store did to something to freeze the phone from my account. Not sure what he meant, but he did get it to work and it was not a hardware problem.

I took the phone home, did a complete wipe, re-activated it and built it from the ground up. I plugged the phone in about 12:15am and removed it from the charger about 6:30 am. It's now about 10:40pm and I'm at 50% battery life. 3 hours usage, 23 hours 15 minutes standby time. Some pretty heavy usage, reading, surfing, downloading all my music, books, movies, etc., and tweaking settings. This new phone (one day of use) seems to be getting at least double the battery life of my first phone. Of course I need to see how it performs over the next week or so.

My settings:

iCloud - on (everything on, including photo stream)

Push email - on (no Exchange accounts)

Brightness - a little above 50%, auto on

Calendar notification - off (will turn it on shortly)

Stock notification - off

Game Center notification - off

All other notification - on

Siri - on, raise to speak - off

Find my phone - on

Cell network search - on

Compass Calibraton - on

Traffic - on

All other System notification - off

Wifi - on (always), find other networks off

Bluetooth - on (always)

ITunes WiFi Sync - on

As I've been typing this and using my phone  to get my settings, I'm now down to 47% (time 11:00pm)

Turn off this/enable that/reset/kill siri.

this 4s battery is draining ME!

Just to add my complaint in this matter.

My iPhone 4S 32GB just keep draining battery, and it doesn't lasts more than 15 hours even in standby. Tried all the suggested fixes with little change. I have my iPhone 4 with the same configuration (iCloud, Push notifications, manual email check, etc.) and the battery last infinitely longer.

I hope Apple will come with a solution. Here in Mexico, mobile companies have a bad customer service, and such complaints are hardly heard,  we have not Apple geniuses.

Okay I previously complained largely over the terrible battery performance on my new iPhone 4S...  I too, followed the advice to drain the battery till it shuts off the iphone twice!!!   Battery performance dramatically improved, even with heavy useage...  It now lasts all day & I presently have 44% at 8:00 pm...

I charged my phone up to 100% this morning, and the drain is not as fast... but it still drains faster than the 4.

From what i read on the hundreds of post (from 2900 posts), i notice two things.

1. Those on Verizon and Sprint seem to be able to get better battery life than those on AT&T. I am not the other side of the planet, and am using similar GSM 3G network as AT&T as oppose to Verizon and Sprint's CDMA network. And i definitely cannot get 24 hours standby with 4 hours usage and still 60-70% left on the battery like some CDMA network users could.

2. iPhone 4S is a quadband worldphone with the antenna design similar to CDMA Verizon phone but with a microSIM slot. Could it be that Apple optimize the firmware for the CDMA chip and add on GSM 3G as an after thought? Therefore, leaving the battery drain more pronounced on GSM 3G phones than CDMA ones? Or could it be that Qualcomm MDM 6610 chip drains more power for GSM/UMTS users?

A quick read on Anadtech's iPhone 4S review revealed that ...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4971/apple-iphone-4s-review-att-verizon/3

So i guess those on GSM/UMTS, though enjoying higher speed of 14.4mbps from HSDPA ... also suffer from higher battery drain.

Above is my observation... may not be a conclusion.

Ok, I'm doing a full recharge for the second time. Let's see...

I've tried everything. I start using my phone around 8 AM and it's 20% battery life by 2 PM. I have let it drain until it shuts off 2 or 3 times now and nothing has improved.

I'm at 18% battery after 5 Hours of usage and 20 Hours of standby on a 4S on sprint. I've never owned an iPhone before, is this considered good? I was thinking it should be better, right?

Been playing a movie for 34 minutes since my last post, down to 39% from 47% battery life. Using bluetooth as my headphone.

I REALLY need Apple to fix this! I just switched over from Blackberry and am slowly starting to regret the decision if this is what is to expect! Prove me wrong Apple!