Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

There seem to be a lot of people posting here who do not have a good grasp of what they can expect from their phone's battery. For those suspecting it's a hardware problem:

If your phone gets stuck on some sort of continual network access loop, causing the battery to drain, then a bad battery would cause the phone to die out well before the 6 hours it's rated to last (for continual use). If your problem is that your usage is around 6 hours but you're not actually using your phone, then it is a software issue -- not hardware.

Here's a repost:

The following values are for NORMAL battery behavior:

• 100% / 200 hours (standby) = 0.5% per hour for standby (assuming that all options that would cause the CPU to work in the background is turned off). If you have Push, messages, locatioins, etc. enabled then expect the rate to be higher than 0.5% per hour!
• 100% / 8 hours (talking on 3G) = 12.5% per hour of talking on 3G
  
• 100% / 6 hrs (internet on 3G) = 16.67% per hour of internet use on 3G, or about 1.5% every 5 minutes (it's actually 1.39%)
• 100% / 9 hrs (internet on wifi) = 11.11% per hour of internet use on wifi, or about 1% every 5 minutes (actually 0.93%)
• Gaming will vary widley based on the game, but expect 3D games to take a huge toll on the battery

     So your confirming that a 10% drop in 15 minutes while Apple was trouble shooting the phone during my appointment at the Genius Bar wasn't normal?  The tech said it wasn't.

The only app running was Google maps with location turned on.  The tech had killed all other apps.  The phone they were checking was running through a complete charge in less than 4 hours.

I'm getting 2.5% drop every hour during standby (while I sleep) and between 10-12% drop under my "normal" use. I had wifi on, mail fetch every hour, maybe 1-2 app running in background, gps on for maps, Siri, find my phone during standby. My normal use is surfing the web, checking email, a couple short phone calls.

My battery issue has been inconsistent. Yesterday it appears as if my battery was working as intended (went through 24hrs with normal use w/o a charge). Last night I charged to 100% around 10pm and now I'm down to 60%. I don't understand the inconsistencies. I reset my phone, calibrated my battery a couple of time, turned off everything people have suggested, turned off my phone...

Im very disappointed in this product. I'll probably switch to the iphone4 since I really haven't been using Siri all that much. I do enjoy a better processor but if my phone can't last through a work day w/o a charge then it's no better than my android.

Looks as if the worst was yet to come.  My phone is now officially a paper weight.  After being on a wall charger over night I woke up to the phone being completly dead.  Sadly it won't turn on at all now. 

As often as I've already charged my 4s, the battery is soon unusable. The devices should be replaced as soon as the fix is out.

For real, it couldnt be right to turn everything off for longer battery time.

Apple should say anything to this, no one knows whats going on.

Its an expensiv smartphone so the Service should be similar.

I don't get problems with my battery? I have an iPhone 4S too. My Wifi is connected, bluetooth is on, 3 e-mail account update every 1 - 3 hours. I have push notifications on the apps I use most (Facebook, Zynga Poker, Whatsapp, eBay, Shopto etc) and my battery can last up to about 40 hours easily.

I have to admit though, when I first got the phone the battery wasn't very good then. But I had the screen brightness on maximum, so I turned it down to about 50% and it's been perfect ever since.

My house mate had the same problem, he uses his 4S like a 14 year old girl and his battery lasts about 12 hours, where as before his brightness was on max and it would only last 8.

Same here, I get worse battery life than my 3gs on iOS5. Can't get through the day, battery usually dies within 7-10 hours.

I upgraded my ipone 4 to ios5 and had the same issue.  I did the same thing everybody did and turned all the cool fetures off, I even went to apple.  I could litterally watch the batter drop.  I started looking again and found a new feature on ios 5 called diagnostics & usage under settings, general, about.  If you click on it and changed to don't send rather than automatic send your battery life will be back to normal.  I looked up the reoports it was sending down where it says diagnostic & usage data, and found my phone was sending out around 200 reports a day back to apple.  This is what was draining my battery and most likely yours too.  Apple uses this to help diagnose problems with the ios and apps.  Good Luck!

My iphone 4s battery lasts about one hour after being charged without even using it. I also have all of my apps set to use minimal power. This is a completely useless phone. Back to the Blackberry I guess.

Ok, well, I had the same issues as everyone else.  Then I was able to fix it somehow using the methods mentioned, including a wipe and new sync to cloud.  I'm not sure what specifically fixed it, but I didn't really care since it was fixed.  That lasted about 2 weeks and then suddenly, yesterday (which was the day Siri went offline) my battery problems re-emerged in a big way.  I turned off Siri to see if that was the problem, but it didn't solve anything.  Nothing else changed on my phone.  I didn't install any new apps or change any settings.  Very strange and frustrating.  Hopefully the iOS patch will fix it in a couple weeks, but it's just baffling and the mystery is a big part of why I am upset.

I'm having the same issues with my battery.  I charged it over night and when I looked it was only on 98%.  I put it back on charge until it was upto 100% but as soon as I unplugged it, it dropped to 98%.  The battery doesn't last a full day, I have to charge it at least twice!!!!  I've tried turning things off but it hasn't helped.  A few weeks for a fix isn't good enough!

adm_pendave wrote:

 

     So your confirming that a 10% drop in 15 minutes while Apple was trouble shooting the phone during my appointment at the Genius Bar wasn't normal?  The tech said it wasn't.

The only app running was Google maps with location turned on.  The tech had killed all other apps.  The phone they were checking was running through a complete charge in less than 4 hours.

I can't confirm anything since I don't know what else was happening with your phone despite almost all settings were off. However, based on my own experience I probably would guess that your 3G connection is causing problems for you. This morning, I decided to listen to Pandora on my way to work. I only had 2-3 bars in some locations (I knew to check because Pandora was stuttering -- lag, you could say). It couldn't have lasted more than a minute. But my battery meter showed a drop of 2% in that time window. Then when I got full bars, not only did the lag/stuttering in Pandora stop, but my battery remained at the same level for the rest of my drive (15 minutes).

Yesterday, I did a factory reset on my phone, and then restored my data from iTunes. Everything _seemed_ normal except during lunch when my friends and I wanted to try to find our location. My phone kept saying there was a problem with Google maps (it just showed a red pin for my last location; no map appeared). I managed to drain my battery about 5% in about 2 minutes waiting and retrying Google maps. Finally a network reset fixed the issue -- what issue I still have no idea, but it was a temporary fix that no longer gave me problems.

I do agree that something was/is amiss in your case. Do I think it's the battery? Not really. On the other hand, I have a strong suspicion resetting your network settings might help (General > About > Reset > Reset Network Settings). It could very well be a software problem in how the phone handles poor network connections while requiring the use of said connections.

Does your usage time seem to increase the same amount as your standby time when you notice these battery draining issues?

Two recent battery related issues...

Two nights ago I went to bed with a fully charged battery. I woke up at 20%. What was weird was that I hit the home button, saw 20%, then it jumped to 100%, then jumped back down to 20%. Very strange...

Just now I was installing FB on my phone while charging. I was at 60%. In the middle of installing the battery actually dropped down to 58%!

Also, the phone got warm while this was going on. It has since cooled, but why would it warm up when installing an app?

I had the 3GS previosuly and never had any issues like this... Very upsetting.

KL

3433 replies... And almost the same amount of tips/tricks/solutions/workarounds.

I think we must conclude that there is no single answer to this battery issue. It seems more like coincidences when people finally 'have found the issue' since it works for some and not for others.

The only thing that seems to work is to put the phone in Flight mode and put it in standby but that's ofcourse not an option.

Let's wait for 5.0.1 and see if it solves the issue