Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

To be sure you have the issue, you need to have a large drain-10% or more per hour while your phone is idle. This is the easiest way to tell. Don't use the phone at all and chart the drop after 60 minutes.

my phone is white with mediocre battery life. my son's is black and his battery is awesome. He is 17 and uses the heck out of his phone. I have dozens of AWDD reports in the diagnostics screen, which I think are errors. (not sure) His phone has none of those. The problem is very random and hard to pin down.

The setting Time Zone in location Services worked for me!!!! Turn it off and it worked. I'm still waiting on Apple to fix this, because it's not designed to function this way.

My wife has a black one with the same issue.  I ordered one for myself Monday, but cancelled the order after seeing the performance of her phone and reading about the problem. 

My wife has applied some of the fixes and battery life seems to have improved.  My question is, what good are all of the useful features if you have to keep them turned off? 

Verizon offered to sell me an iPhone 4 for $99 when I cancelled my order.  I might just take them up on that.

Are your reminders location based and locations enabled? This has been the problem for some folks in that their locations are continually requesting network access.

I really hope it's not a hardware problem.

Yeah down 5% in 2 min is equivelent to around 40min of talk time lol.

Hardware problem? The "A" team will never admit to that.

I have a white iphone 4S and have the battery issues as well...

So, I have been getting somewhat bad battery life and trying to live with it or wait to see what is going on. I tried my hardest to not use the iphone 4S since the last full charge to see what I was getting with little use. I made it stretch out a full day but the numbers still don't look good. With a few phone calls, very little to no safari, no music, a few siri and text messages, no games. I have an ipad so I don't use my phone for much except email, text and phone / reminders. Here is what I ended up with 100% charge down to 2%: 3 hours 32 minutes of usage. That is not good for hardly any use. I have all location service turned off but Cellular location and compass calibration.

I'm pretty sure this has already been said before - but I will share my experience.

I had the same problem at the beginning with my iPhone 4S.

I had experienced this before with my Droid Incredible previously, and HTC informed me that sometimes the battery must be 'calibrated' and gave me instructions for doing so.

On the support pages here, Apple recommends draining the battery fully at least once a month (I checked since some batteries don't like to be drained all the way).

Using those same instructions, I drained the iPhone 4S battery to the point that it turned off (the last % took nearly 45 minutes of playing 'Warp Dash' which would indicate a calibration issue). I then Put it on the charger and left it overnight. In the morning, I turned it on and then back off again and let it charge for another half hour or so.

After that process, I have been using it normally and experiencing great (normal for a smartphone?) battery life.

I am a moderate user who plugs the phone in when I go to bed nightly.

*UPDATE*

GOT A BRAND NEW IPHONE 4S TODAY! (old one had the problem which is described here)

I did the following steps:

• activated it as new phone, no backups
• charged it to 100%
• turned of everything except Mobile Network and Wlan
• no iCloud or any other push Account
• no notification center
• no wifif sync
• no automatic timezone
• no location services
• no siri
• and no whatever i forgot to wrote down here

then i did NOTHING with it, except some sms and one 3 minute call!

RESULT:

74% battery,

usage: 3:06 (thats really strange, because it only layed on the desktop, except maybe 10 minutes of sms and just one 3 minute call)

standby 4:48

so it dropped in nearly 5 hours of ultra low usage to 74 % !!! i'm really ****** off!

Can you guys post some usage hours rather than saying I used the iPhone "intensely"?

Go to Settings->General->Usage->(scrool to bottom)->Time since last full charge:

Post your current percentage, and how many hours of usage/standby it shows.

Here is mines:

     Do you think this is normal:

     Batt@44%

     Usage 3hr,30min

     Standby 15hours,24min

This is without  3G, just WIFI, and normal cell connection. Haven't made a call, or SMS.

Thanks

I haven't turned anything off. I have WiFi on, no bluetooth, all location services doing as they want. I have 4 push eMail accounts on the phone.

Since last full Charge:

Batt = 88%

Usage = 40 minutes

Standby = 6 Hours, 26 minutes

Hope that helps!

Standby drain of the battery is what is the problem.

I put my phone into Airplane mode, the battery doesn't drop even 1% an hour. 

When I turn it on, it drops around 6% an hour. 

With the advertised 200hour standby time,  it should drop 0.5% an hour, but I'll give them a break and let them have 1% an hour, but the phone drops 6% so thats 6x drain during standby!

if i follow the 0.5%/hr, thats' 12x th drain!

I think some thing is wrong with the iPhones baseband modem when on certain mobile carriers.  Each carrier uses different equipment which has different Power managments.  There could also be a modem update to phones.  remember that the 4S has a brand new antenna design.  Transmitting signals is one of the biggest power draw of a phone.