Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Very happy with 4s battery performance.

Yes, notifications, locations, even push on! I setup my 4s as a new phone, synced contacts from iTunes (NOT ICLOUD).

Turn off send diagnostics to apple. Syncing contacts and calendars from iCloud seems to cause a crash loop, hence considered a FIRMWARE FAULT ( point to note, this crash loop is a backround backround process not visible without monitoring CPU usage). It will continually send a resent packets of data over any avaialablw Internet connection which uses wifi radio or 3G radio. Without wifi, (or decent 3G connection BLAME NETWORKS HERE!!! Antenna is wicked) it will send itsy bitsy packets of data over and over again and if they don't make it through it will retry.

Which may be the major contributing factor to battery drain. It's relentless until they patch with a delta so turn it off!!

Turn off wifi when not in use.

I had to be really patient, but when I took my 4s out the box, I used the storage charge it already had, ran it flat then charged it in flight mode until it hit 100%. Better than flight mode would be to TURN IT BLOODY WELL OFF TO CHARGE ONCE A MONTH OR WEEK OR SO!  With diagnostic reporting and time zone setting off, most people who see symptoms of battery drain will be able to charge fully and notice a substantial improvement In standby/ performance until the 5.01 delta patch.

Add another iPhone 4s with battery problems.  3 days old and a battery life of 12 hours with very light use (30mins calls), location services off, notifications off, wifi off, iCloud off.  The only thing on is GSM. I have paid a fortune to use an iPhone as a cheap mobile and still have a battery life worse than a 4 year old £20 basic GSM phone.

Well done Apple, a definite case of less for more.

Dude turn diagnostic reporting off, and turn off calendar sync in mail accounts. Also iCloud contact sync is considered a culprit due to bugs until the update.

Let it fully drain out, then charge it fully (when it comes back on, turn it off and leave it for four hours)

Bluetooth / wifi off when not in use.

Helps, ya?

Here's the latest...  I charged my phone to 100%.  Unplugged it at 2:30pm.  By almost 6:00pm, it says that the phone has been on standby for 3hrs 10min...and usage of 1hr 11min.  I haven't used the phone for 1hr 11min.  lolololol  Something is apparently running while the phone is locked & sitting on my desk.  I think that's what draining my battery...whatever that process is...  Let's hope OS 5.0.1 solves it!!!

Nice to hear it shows improvement !, I hope they have fixed the email fetch times, even setting the fetch period to 1 hour the phone actually fetches at random times usually around 40 mins or less, def won't help the battery !.

I just got my iPhone 4s and am quite happy with the battery but since reading the posts on here i am not sure if it is good or bad. I am currently at 1% and my usage since my last charge is as follows

Usage 6hours 21 min

Standby 1day 8 hours

anyones thoughts would be much appreciated.

"[...]ran it flat then charged it in flight mode until it hit 100%. Better than flight mode would be to TURN IT BLOODY WELL OFF TO CHARGE ONCE A MONTH OR WEEK OR SO!"

I believe this is good advice. So many people have noticed weird charging times etc. Clearly 3G is interfering with charge, as someone else hinted to.

I have found a solution that seems to work well.

Under LOCATION SERVICES go to SYSTEM SETTINGS.  Turn off DIAGNOSTICS & USAGE, LOCATION-BASED iADs, SETTING TIME ZONE and TRAFFIC.

Note: this TRAFFIC has nothing to do with maps.

Battery life improved tremendously!!!!

Settings -> Network -> Cellulard Data OFF

See how long your battery lasts with that setting. 

Leave everthing else on, WIFI, LOCATION, BLUETOOTH

All technology can be viewed as faulty if the user wants to find something, but the people  who know how amazing cell phones are know that 20 years ago if these phones were released peoples heads would explode.

It bothers the crap out of me. I switched from a 4 to a 4S. If the bug is supposed to be caused by IOS5, how can it be that a 4 with an upgrade to IOS5 gives a better battery life than my 4S???? That is obviously not something Apple can fix with an update.

Besides..., all those ideas of "turning things off"  in your phone are well meant, but really annoying! You can't tell me I bought a phone that has to charge TWICE A DAY????

If people today had half the brain matter that people had 20 years ago their heads would explode. 20 years ago nobody would have wanted any of this because FB, twitter, email, youtube, mp3 or DivX didn't exist - at least not in any widespread way. They were quite content with their discman and a little peace and quiet in the public transport. Those smartphones do nothing else than aggregating what's out there - which isn't much honestly despite what the industry would have us think - they're not more interesting or amazing than a universal tv remote which would have had an AMOLED screen instead of a CRT TV next to it. If at least you could swap their AA/AAA batteries...

One night iPhone 4 running iOS5 was 60%, in the morning 30%. Next day batt was 40%, in the morning it was COMPLETLY drained! Seems to be getting worse and worse even with my phone not in use.

Jordy1978 wrote:

 

It bothers the crap out of me. I switched from a 4 to a 4S. If the bug is supposed to be caused by IOS5, how can it be that a 4 with an upgrade to IOS5 gives a better battery life than my 4S???? That is obviously not something Apple can fix with an update.

 

The fact that the 4 and the 4S have different hardware is a good indication that despite them both running on iOS5 one can exhibit different behavior from the other. Let's hope that an update can and will fix things.

http://www.apple.com/iphone/compare-iphones/

4S

• Talk time: Up to 8 hours on 3G, up to 14 hours on 2G (GSM)
• Standby time: Up to 200 hours
• Internet use: Up to 6 hours on 3G, up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi
• Video playback: Up to 10 hours
• Audio playback: Up to 40 hours

4

• Talk time: Up to 7 hours on 3G, up to 14 hours on 2G (GSM)
• Standby time: Up to 300 hours
• Internet use: Up to 6 hours on 3G, up to 10 hours on Wi-Fi
• Video playback: Up to 10 hours
• Audio playback: Up to 40 hours

Quite interesting is --> http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html

where one can read: "Use Airplane Mode in low- or no-coverage areas: Because your iPhone always tries to maintain a connection with the cellular network, it may use more power in low- or no-coverage areas.[...]"

Also of interest is this:

"

• Usage: Amount of time iPhone has been awake and in use since the last full charge.  The phone is awake when you’re on a call, using email, listening to music, browsing the web, or sending and receiving text messages, or during certain background tasks such as auto-checking email.
• Standby: Amount of time iPhone has been powered on since its last full charge, including the time the phone has been asleep.

"

So clearly this explains why some people have usage stats increases without "manually" using the phone... i.e. because auto-checking mail and certain background tasks count towards usage.

That link was different from : http://www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html

where Apple explains its testing methodology for producing usage projections:

For 3G internet for the 4S:

"Testing conducted by Apple in September 2011 using preproduction iPhone 4S units and software, on both GSM and CDMA carrier networks. Internet over 3G tests were conducted over a 3G network using a dedicated web server. iPhone 4S browsed snapshot versions of 20 popular web pages and received mail once an hour. All settings were default except: The Wi-Fi feature Ask to Join Networks and Auto-Brightness were turned off. Battery life depends on the cellular network, location, signal strength, 3G connectivity, feature configuration, usage, and many other factors. Battery tests are conducted using specific iPhone units; actual results may vary."

Finally I'm quite curious to see if anyone ever put his 4/4S in airplane mode and left it sleeping for 8-12 days to see if that claim is really valid i.e. 200-300hours. In any case that's a useless number because it cannot reflect something someone would ever do and so it should be removed from the spec sheet as it creates stupid expectations for the end user.

I mean, one had to use his brain and look at the common denominator to understand what kind of phone this is. Because it is a 3G world where apps use the web constantly, THIS IS A 6HRS SMARTPHONE. If you were to have no app at all, no mail etc. and would use it as a flip phone for calling only, it would be a 8HRS PHONE. So in my opinion, anyone claiming he ever had anything else than that with 200+ apps and notifications on is simply distorting reality. You tell me. There is also the possibility that people are interacting more and more i.e. always touching their phone (I suspect it's FB status crack-like addiction... I know it's that, as I see it in the public transport, people look and stare at the FB status, then put the phone back in their pockets, then 30 secs later check the status again... most likely the same at work... imagine the loss of productivity for businesses, and they can't prove it because it's not on their networks!!) and are talking less and less and using 3G more and more without noticing, and 3G is more hungry than talk. That's a proven trend. So someone claiming 2-3 days usage is a "stoic" user... he uses his phone 2 hours a day and turns everything off or closes it until the next day. I rest my case.