Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Apple's corporate speech policy :

http://9to5mac.com/2011/11/08/apple-seeding-ios-5-0-1-to-end-users-to-test-batte ry-life-improvements-internal-retail-store-memo-on-battery-issues/#idc-container

JUST HAD OVER 9 HOURS USAGE TIME ON MY 4S 32GB with 22hours standby and no noticeable standby drain.

But have not used 3G or made any calls in that time, only SMS and iMessage and a lot of wifi browsing and reading rss feeds, I've been on wifi majority of the time.

I had bad battery life till I played around with all the settings, the thing everyone needs to check is if usage is counting while the phone is locked and how much, there should be only 1-3 minutes usage for 1 hour of having your phone locked, any more then that and it will firstly be your settings causing the drain.

I also agree that conditioning the battery does help, 3-4 full drain and charge cycles did help a lot.

I noticed charging when off seems to give inaccurate battery readings, I charged in off state for 7 hours, unplugged, booted, said 100%, plugged charger in while on 100%, and it instantly jumped back to 98%, let it fill up again, unplugged, used the phone, noticed it drained quite fast.

Recommend charging up before ph shuts itself off.

With the good battery life I had now (9hrs) my settings were:

Weather widget off, have a feeling this drains a lot in standby.

Wifi on

Notifications on for 11 apps, most of the default ones except weather, find friends, game centre, stocks, I have a few extra apps that do notify, but fb and twitter are also off though may not be a factor, fb also has its own notification options under its own setting in the main settings window, all set to off, I'd check all the configs under each app in the main settings window to eliminate services you don't need.

And turn off each switch in each app under notifications before disabling it just incase.

Location services on with only camera app enabled, everything under system services below the apps list is all off.

Carrier set to auto as default.

Brightness is on auto and set to 1/3 (33%) from left.

That's enough for me as its naturally brighter and clearer on the 4s.

iCloud logged in but all settings off.

Mail contacts calendar:

5 mail accounts, push off, manual fetch, 1hr should be fine though.

Under calendars, New invitation alerts off and time zone support off

Phone:

International assist off

Sim pin off

FaceTime off, iMessages on

Store:

Auto downloads all off

General settings:

Siri on, raise to speak off

Network:

Mobile data on (3G enabled)

I don't use hotspot

Bluetooth off and I don't use wifi sync

Spotlight has unnecessary things turned off

Restrictions on, ping off and game centre options off

Date and time:

Automatically set off

Have it set to a city

Any other settings I didn't mention are default.

If you can get about 9mins of usage per % with these settings connected to wifi and just browsing and reading in a naturally lit room or at night so your brightness doesn't go up automatically, you will be about the same as my usage, it's mainly 3G and screen brightness that makes my usage fluctuate now, you can test over 10 mins but the overall usage time will reflect your habits.

Before you try, do a full cycle charge from 1% till you see the plug indicator in the battery icon.

One flaw in the software is that the brightness goes up auto, but won't come back down until you lock in a darker area.

This isn't a fix and I expect better from the 5.0.1 fix as its still an hour under apple specs, but it should help in the mean time even if you adjust what you can live with, I'm fine with how my setup is and don't need to adjust anything on or off now and can go 2 days or more.

If you try let me know how it goes all :-)

Oops I meant around 6 mins usage per %, not 9. :-D

I'm very dissapointed.

The battery only holds a schoolday ( 6hours )

GPS, Siri, Hotspot etc. are switched off. The brightness is on the lowest level.

I'm a big Applefan and waited 11hours to get an iPhone, but now I really start to regret the decision to buy an iPhone 4S :(

When is the release of the iOS 5.0.1 update?

I was very disappointed and frustrated with battery life like everyone here but then I did a complete drain and 18 hours charge followed by full restore from recovery mode. Reinstalled iOS5 from fresh and installed all apps from scratch.

Configured all mail accounts manually. Synced contacts from outlook and then photos and music etc.

To be honest the battery life has improve considerably even though I have everything running now including location services and 3G.

See my previous posts for exact steps.

I didn't go through all 263 pages so if this has been observed already, I apologize.  I've noticed that my phone will get hot when I keep it in my jeans pocket.  I'm assuming this is happening because it loses connection and trys really hard to regain connection. This is when my battery drains.  Yesterday I stayed home all day and by 3pm still had 86% battery.  I then did some errands with my phone in my pocket and I was down to 15% by the time I went to bed.  I've played with all the mentioned settings, but they seem to be irrelevant if you have a strong signal.  So when my leg starts burning from the heat it generates, I know my battery is getting drained.  I hope they can fix this because I'd rather not have to put my phone in airplane mode when it's in my pocket.

I've tried every "trick" to get better battery life out of this 4S; nothing works.  Last night the **** thing thermaled while sitting on my nightstand charging (next to my year old iPhone 4 that still had 85% battery left from a charge the day before...).  I can't even rely on this phone for the alarm; it still shows it as having a full charge at 64% while it's thermal sensors have shut it down.  I have had the 93%-95%-97% issue after it's charged all night but could live with it until they release a software fix.  I have a Genius Appointment tomorrow night after work, so I'll see what a new 4S does.

Over heating is an actual sign of battery fault I have poor batterylife but no exsessive heat. I would go to your local apple store (if you have one) if not call apple. My friends iphone 4s felt like a stove, when he took it to apple they put a meter on it and the battery was faulty.

Yeah I know.  Figured the battery was faulty but never had an actual thermal shutdown until last night/this morning.  The usage statitistics showed it's last sync with iCloud was at 23:49.  I checked it @ 06:00 and it had thermaled with a matching usage/standby time of 5h 49m.  Leads me to believe that something to do with the iCloud syncing process is nuking the battery.  The diagnostics show that there was a kernel error and it must have restarted itself and just hung.

do you have any email accounts hooked up to your iphone? my friend hooked up 3 emails, backed up with icloud. The next day he started having really bad heat problems.

Yes I do.  I have to have it for work so turning them off is not an option.  No problems at all with my iPhone 4 running iOS5 either.  Thinking this 4S is a dud.....

It makes me angry if I am considered as a beta tester by apple!!! I paid the full price for a product where my battery drains completely within 6-8 hours without even using it. I tell all my friends not to buy the new iphone and I'm about to reactivate my old 3GS.

Besides that, calls are muted or disconnected very often. But since I have to run my device in flightmode anyway, this is just another side effect of an unfinished product.

Best I phone ever... bla bla bla

New 4S receieved and fully charged Monday PM. Stats on new 4S now show

• Usage time slightly more than 3 hours
• Standby time 2 days 0 hours
• Call time 25 minutes
• Data sent 2 Mb, received 18 Mb

Battery indicator still shows 41% remaining. I know I am not using it the way it could / I would like to yet but still with previous 4S it never exceeded 8 hours before battery went totally flat with same settings / usage.

if you guys use the facebook app, go to settings and enter the facebook settings on the bottom and turn off all push notifications, that are all on by default and i didnt know this, this helped a bit also.

try it

After trying all the recommended workarounds I ended up simply turning off mobile data, location services and wifi. Especially disabling wifi made a big difference in standby battery usage. Now I'm getting 3-4 days of standby time easily. Makes me think the wifi radio is being used quite actively for some reason even when the phone is in standby.

Interestingly enough there was a big difference in battery use between my home and work wifi network. My home network is rather busy with lots of traffic going through the air while my work network is pretty much unused most of the day. Anyone else notice the same thing?