Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

it must be widespread enough, its all over the net in discussion forums, and also has been in articles on CNN and yahoo tech amongst others...I would imagine its widespread enough.

There is something running all the time draining the battery...when i dont use my phone and turn it on and look at the usage, the time of usage increased..that tells me something is constantly running and it has to be a glitch in IOS 5...thats why even on standby the battery drains quicker than it should...I guess time will tell...

One person mentioned setting alarm to wake with playlist?  HOw do you do that, if I might ask?  When I set an alarm in the clock there is no choice to set to a playlist.....just a list of noises you can choose from to wake you.  I'd love to wake to music instead.

Thanks.

And my battery is improving with more frequent chargings.  The first day it was awful and lasted only a few hours with NO use of the phone.  For me it is the lousy call quality (static) that may drive me to return it.

I just did the full restore as suggested by Syther101.

However I did not restore from iCloud (I used the backup on my Mac).  I would have done the iCloud restore, but my iPhone has not fully backed up to iCloud as yet.

It has only been 1 day so far, but battery life is better (but still not as good as my iPhone4).  I have 18 hours of standby and 2hrs 47 minutes of use time with 64% battery.

Yesterday (before I did restore), my battery was dead at 18 hours (and with less use time). I also did cycle the battery to zero and then did a full charge.

Hopefully this fixes the problem.  At least the battery for my iPhone4S now lasts more than a day.

I got my 4S (32GB, black, on T-Mobile Germany) tuesday and I am experiencing battery drain issuses since day one.

At first I did a restore from my old 3GS iTunes backup (as you would) and the 4S was draining 4-6% per hour, i found it begging for a charge the next morning. I tried then essentially everything mentionend in this thread, first starting do disable selected features of the phone in the hope to find the culprit - to no success. I then did a restore to factory settings and bit by bit adding my apps and settings by hand, monitoring the pover consumption for a few hours after each step.

I was down to about 1% to 1.5% per hour and it stayed that way.

At that stage I was confident I had the problem solvend and a few full charge/discharge cycles would improve things further. I ran the phone down yesterday till it switched off and did a recharge (on mains), making sure to leave the phone on the charger for a couple of hours after it reached 100%.

Since then, it is eating 3% per hour, just sitting on the desk, overnight with zero interaction from me (i was asleep) and still all non essential things disabled.

Whats more - I made sure that I terminated all Background Apps before I took the phone off the charger (I even checked this with an "Activity Monitor" App (I did not forget to kill this App as well after checking)).

Observations I made when I examined the phone this a.m.:

Despite me not having used the phone, the Usage time was up to 9 hours, standby time was 12 hours - very suspicious.

Also, under Settings->General.>Info->Diagnose & Usage->Diagnose&Usagedata (this is translated from german, so the naming of these Menu Items might differ on your phone) I found lots of crash reports from a process "awdd" wich I would suspect being associated with WiFi somehow...

Just for the statistics: I had the SIM-PIN Problem as well, despite having installed a brand new SIM in the phone, I had to disable the SIM-PIN to stop the phone losing connection all the time.

BTW: I rang the Apple Support as well, they clamied to have no knowledge of problems and had no further recommendations.

make sure your Wifi when not using it outside of your home is off, that drains the battery big time because it's constantly searching.

I never switched off WiFi with either my 3GS or my first iPhone - it has never been a problem and it should not be. Despite that: The phone was sitting on my desk - perfect recpetion for wifi and 3G...

Ok I'm on 1 day 12 hours with 5hours 53 mines usage and i'm on 27% battery, that's with wifi left on 24/7/ As to the awdd  have you looked at the reports? They are not crash reports, crash reports say crash reports, these seem to be the usage data being sent to Apple if you look at them, crash reports are very different, and huge!

I too thought a full restore would solve my battery life issues, but no. I have a white iPhone 4S 64GB and I am struggling to get 10 hours of battery life. For a usage reference, my iPhone 4 was laying me about 60 hours between charges (or 6 times better battery life)  the restore changed nothing for me. I have turned off location services. Even deleted a few of my email accounts, anything to make it through one work day, but alas nothing has worked. I just burned through 3% in the last 4 minutes as I wrote this. Unfortunatley I think the phone will have to go back. I assume this is a software problem, but I am concerned it is hardware related and I may get stick with this issue for the next 2 years. The only thing I don't understand is why this didn't show up when Apple was doing their battery life testing?  I don't know a single person with a 4S that is even getting 1/2 the posted battery life claim, so I think something has gone awry.

Sorry I can't seem to edit my last post, but I wanted to add that I did buy a battery case with a 1700mah internal battery. If I leave it plugged in to that all day, I can last through the day on both batteries with about 20% left on the internal battery and 0% on the battery case. So atleast that may be an option for some.  I have the Unu case in black.

I have my 32 GB unlocked from Apple running with an o2-Germany SIM-Card.

Battery life is horrible compared with my iPhone 4 (16 GB, same carrier). I think there is always something running in the background which causes "usage" (see Settings -> General), too (like yassir75 said). Last night I put it into Airplane Mode, it was at 45 % with 4h8m "usage" and 11h5m standby. 10 hours after doing *nothing* (not even network-stuff) its down to 31 % with 6h52m "usage" and 21h 28m standby.

Full restore (with and without DFU-Voodoo) did not help. I even tried without using my old backup - no success. Switching SIM-Card - no success.

I dont know if there can be a hardware defect that can cause "usage", but I think the "usage" is the real problem here. So my bet is: Apple can fix this via software. Hopefully.

2 hours and 50 minutes of just laying standby. Drained 20% of my battery. In the usage screen i see that it says

Usage: 2 Hours, 50 Minutes

Stanby: 2 Hours, 50 Minutes

It would be nice to have some type of "Task Manager" so i can see whats running. =)

@killhippie: you are right, they are diagnostic data rather than crash-reports.

What remains is that usage time goes up at a rate of roughly 50% of the time the phone is in standby. That is with *everything* in the Multitasking bar killed and with wlan & mobile data disabled.

I will do some experiments with (again) deleting my Mail-Accounts as the ActivityMonitor still shows the MobileMail as running despite having killed that thing vom the Multitasking bar...

@bjournfot: there are some activtyMonitors in the AppStore - your data is interessting, as my UsageTime goes up as half the rate of elapsed time (vs yours at the same rate) and my battery-drain is half of yours. Perhaps in your case are both cpus enaged in silly things an only one in my case?

By the way, my 3GS with iOS 5 ist not showing this behaviour, i.e. usage time is not going up in standby and no battery drain.

Message was edited by: jensfromploen: typos + comment

There is iStat in die AppStore. Maybe more...