Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

TOTALLY understand ..

this is making me very nervous .

After nearly 3 weeks with the iPhone 4s, I would like to point out a few observations I made regarding my battery life.  Forgive me if this is repetitive.  First, iMessage is a huge drain on battery, even if the phone is in standby mode with the message app still open (in the multitasking bar).  Stopping the messaging app seems to dramatically improve battery.  Second, it seems like 3g is using much more battery than it should.  I don't know if this has to do with the dual antennas or the phone constantly searching for a stronger signal, but if I am in a place with poor reception, the battery goes quick.  Finally,  phone calls drain the battery quickly.  I am assuming this is an issue with the dual antennas constantly swapping.  FTR, I have turned of the 'set time zone' service.

3 hours of talk time and you are happy with that?

Yesterday I took my phone to the Genius bar for battery issues as well as a screen issue. (My touch screen kept being unresponsive).  The battery issue was also affecting me, yestready my phone was fully charged at 8am  and dead by 1-1:30pm (I had two phone calls for a total of 5 minutes that morning).   Apple ended up replacing my phone with a new 4GS.   When i recieved the phone I only added my mail accounts, one gmail account and one exchange account.  The phone was at 60% at 2pm and by 5:30 it was at 10%.   When i got home i charged the phone again and prior to going to bed I deleted the exchange account from the phone.   When i woke up this morning my phone was at 95%.  When I arrived at work I re-enabled the exchange account and sure enough the drain started again.  Its 8:26 and my phone has is already at 80% down 15% after 1 hours after exchange was re-enabled.   I hope they fix this soon!

Yes, they are working on a fix.

Im having the same problem i work on the roads and i always use maps only problem is the battery drains like a tap running... As I'm writing this now my phones on charge and hasn't really come off charge thats the only way it lasts all-day .... And as to playing games on a IOS5 devices with no charging equipment is most differently a no go apple need to fix this **** quick knew i should of got a galaxy s2

A) That was a violation of your NDA.

B) What are your settings?

Well things are changing. Went to bed at 11:30pm with 50% battery, woke up at 6:45am with 35% life. The previous nights I had 4% drop. I think it has to do with how the phone handles incoming email. This morning I had 50 emails-all this thread!-and that made the standby drain 4X worse.

It may be a long way to Tipperary. A good thing is that Apple finally acknowledged the issue to some degree. But it begs the question that if it's only a small group of users who are experiencing battery issues, then why fix it... and how to selectively fix it without introducing further uncertainty to the OS. A few posts ago this guy who does support for carriers alluded to the fact that he saw lost connections and that the Iphone radio would remain on after that, hence draining the battery. It may be in the long run carriers will have to implement some changes to their networks if IOS is to do well? People say the issue is not "hardware" because it may affect 4 and 4S with IOS and even Ipad. But that's a very simplistic view. Hardware is not 4, 4S or Ipad... hardware is Qualcomm etc. It's all in the implementation of that.

Sparse reports on Macrumours and elsewhere suggest some improvement to standby time with 5.0.1 but very little improvement to usage time. It's early I'll concede. People can fall back on the idea that it's beta but honestly if there was a way to significantly boost usage time you would hope that after 15+ days of work they would make it happen at all cost even if it were to break the rest, as it's dev who are testing this and they can deal with it. It may be a good idea to lower your expectations in order to be pleasantly suprised, after waiting for 30 days+. You wanted so many gadgets and stuff and all and some justifications to buy a new device so you got it and it's more power hungry. I say live with it.

It may also be a good idea to start saving a few (hundreds of) $ in order to buy a case that strenghtens the signal and also to buy an external battery extender. Also if you haven't bought the device yet, carefully chose your carrier... as this affects battery life.

I had same problem.  Turned off Facebook push notifications, time zone disabled and Siri "raise to speak" and now get better battery life than I had with the iPhone 4.  Dramitic difference.  I think the "raise to speak" feature was causing most of my battery drain issues.

http://mashable.com/2011/11/02/apple-admits-ios-5-battery-problem/

and

http://mashable.com/2011/11/02/apple-seeds-beta-ios-5-0-1/

In case everyone hasn't gotten the message yet:

YES, Apple is working on a fix.

I'd like to suggest that everyone post their settings when they message.  I've had very good success with minor changes, and I get very acceptable battery life having done these things.  Posting your settings will also separate actual iPhone users from the minions of Fandroids coming in here posting nonsense just to make matters seem worse, and could help Apple improve the situation quicker.  "My iPhone *****" rants might make you feel better temporarily, but they do nothing to resolve your problem, or anyone else's.

My settings:

WiFi: Ask to join networks off.

Notifications: Calendar and Mail not included in notification center.

Location services > System Serivces: Setting time zone off.

General: Bluetooth off.

General: iTunes wifi synch off.

iCloud: Mail and notes off.

iCloud > Documents and Data: use cellular off.

Mail > Fetch New Data: Push off, manual selected.

Mail > Fetch New data > Advanced: Everything set to manual

Siri: Raise to speak off.

Last but not least, while looking at iCloud, I discovered my phone was stuck trying to perform a backup to iCloud.  Although it is supposed to do this only while on WiFi and plugged in, I discovered when going to iCloud > Storage & Backup that the back-up process was hung and still showed as in progress even when running on battery.  I cancelled the backup, turned iCloud backup off, and then back on again, and battery life improved greatly (which makes a lot of sense).  I advise checking to see if you have the same issue.

One last point:

I've seen many people complaining that they lose power rapidly during use.  Check the specifications:  WiFi internet time is 9 hours, 3G internet time is 6.  Talk time is 8.  Movie time is 10.  That means, under the best scenario, if the screen is on you can expect roughly a 10% drop in battery per hour.  If you are actually talking, then expect 12.5% drop per hour.  NOW, how many AT&T users talk on the phone WHILE browsing?  My guess is the talk time does not include the screen being on.

My point is that some of the comments I am seeing just reflect an expectation that things should be better than they are, but may NOT represent performance out of specification.  I'm not arguing there is no problem, but I am suggesting that it may not be as bad as some here would like to represent it to be.

What is "a lot" though? If you know for sure that your battery is misbehaving with PUSH, it could be a number of things: 1) a mal-configured email account 2) a bad entry in your contacts list 3) too many calendar events being updated and pushed 4) poorly configured server on your email provider's side, etc.

There are too many reasons to say for the moment. You may want to try backing up your email accounts, deleting them, and re-adding them to see if it may help.

Your last point is very good. It's time for people to forget 3GS usage times and such, it's a new world where we'll all be charging our smartphones basically everyday, unless they're tweaked in the most extreme way to save power by trading key features.

And that opens a new segment in the market. I hope Microsoft you're reading this. There is a niche market opening up for mobile users who truly want mobility for days without charging. As Apple and Android focus on bringing always stronger ARM cpus to the market with more and more of a "desktop OS", there will be demand for a phone that's a bit less "smart" and more mobile... what about using an E-ink color screen, for instance? What about a device that's slightly bigger but has a real battery in it? Food for thought.

I finally solved my battery issue. My solution was to was to change from Gmail ActiveSync (Exchange) to Gmail IMAP configuration with 15 minute fetch interval. This took me from about 3% an hour on standby to 0.8% on standby!

The downside is that I don't get my emails in realtime, but at least I can run the phone for two days without charging now.

Note I am still using GoogleSync for contacts, just not email anymore.

Other observations:

* Turning off notification service made NO difference in my case.

* Reading over this thread, it looks like different people are running into different issues, but I am also seeing a lot of voodoo advice without methodological testing to isolate the problems, and I think people are jumping the gun on replacing the hardware, as this is almost certainly a software issue from what I've seen.

Good luck!

  - Oren