Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

No wonder Apple continue to use a crippled version of multi-tasking, if this is the best they can do. It looks like they really dropped the ball with the 4S, and I'm very curious to hear what the eventual cause is, as this pathetic battery life is downright embarassing...

Having same issues. Started the day with 100% charge and down to 60% in 4 hours after having had 3 short calls, checked email once and weather once.  Had turned off location, push email and auto time zone, as well as screen brightness down.  Also turned off lift to speak in Siri.  Phone also in stand by mode.  Seems like the remaining option is to turn the phone off unless I want to make a call!  Otherwise going to have to have phone plugged in all the time.  Hopefully the fix will come very soon.  Beautiful phone but not very practical at this point.

After ios 5 update my iphone is not only suffering from battery problems, which is terrible but the Phone button is not functioning either, so I can not make phone calls or listen my messages, except my contacts. I disabled the notification button but I am keep getting notifications!!!! The phone is also getting hot during charging and staying thereafter, which wasn´t the case before. I have tried everything and nothing worked for me.

I just bought my iPhone 4s last month. My battery life was awesome until yesterday. I charged my phone Monday night and woke up with a 12% battery. This happened to my iPhone 3GS last year when the IOS 4 was released. My battery ended up dying completely and I had to get out my old iPhone 1 from 2007 until last month. I really hope they update this soon because I don't enjoy carrying around my power cord every where I go.

Gary Bastoky wrote:

 

I find it interesting that for about a week my phone's battery was draining excessively, even with all those services, etc. turned off. It seems though that perhaps the battery needed to be conditioned or something, because the past few days I have only needed to charge my phone once at the end of the day rather than many times a day. I still have all those features turned off, but it seens weird that it went from heavy, heavy drain and having the phone heat up, to suddenly acting as it should. I'm holding my breath waiting for the other shoe to drop, but for now, I'm happy.

I agree with Gary Bastoky that the battery needs to be conditioned. I also noticed considerable change in the battery times. I have been taking hourly screen shots during the day since I noticed the issue.

Today there has been even better performance. I have all notifications ON and email accounts set to push. Siri is on and all lovation services are on. I have 3G on at all times until I get home when it picks up the WiFi.

All I did to sort the battery out was to completely drain the battery and gave it full 18 hours charge in OFF state from mains power charger (not computer USB). then restored from recovery mode in iTunes and dint not restore from back up but manually installed all the applications again and synced contact from Outlook and inported media files etc.

There is also another category of people, like me, who actually don't have the Iphone. But I quite agree that there are different user profiles. Which is why a hundred pages ago I had suggested the profiling of the user issues. But to no avail. Correlating types of drain with carriers, installed apps, restore method, mail config and other settings was the way to go and would have been quite revealing. Needed also was a simple test methodology to figure out to which category you belonged - and which people really needed to return their phone. Unfortunately, the forum is a poor tool for all this and Apple didn't see the opportunity to work in the open. People seem to be lacking information on their device and know more about Apple's marketing than the fine print which spells out the real stuff. Plus I think finally Apple took a gamble with a new CPU, a new 3G chip, and Siri altogether with the same choice of battery. Doing so I think, while the trend for more internet usage than calls strenghtens, actually compounds battery usage to something closer to 6hrs than many anticipated. To top it off, some draining during standy for some users and a questionable choice of factory settings - I mean people can select their damned city for a clock, come on - create a situation where the 6hrs of usage become contiguous. Also, I don't know why but I get the feeling that Apple failed with the restore from a prior device - again for some users - but this is critical for their user base, because starting from scratch is time consuming and really goes again what Apple is about - most likely they will have to improve on the verifying of the apps in the store in terms of 3G use and such too. It's a real puzzle and we'll never know what happened really. They will never tell.

In the end I think Apple may have to think different for different users. It is quite possible that this phone is no longer suitable for intense 3G use i.e. 200 apps+ scenerio and multiple mail accounts with pull and all. They may need a "glamour" phone i.e. the actual one - and a "hardcore" phone i.e. slightly bigger with 2 batteries and rated for 24hrs of intense use. The user base too needs to become more educated and Apple has a long way to go to foster that in my opinion. Time will tell.

While Lithium Ion batteries do not need conditioning, the battery sensors in the iPhone may need calibrating......   That's probably one reason that so may users have been able to use their phones for an hour or more, with 1% showing on the status line......

I, like many others, have had problems with low battery life.

     I found this to be helpful;

1st, completely drain battery untill phone turns off, then charge overnight.

2nd, turn off features that aren't necessary. (See other posts on this)

3rd, double click home button to reveal apps that are currently running, press and hold any app untill they all start to wiggle then hit the - sign to force close applications that you aren't currently using. I had over a dozen running I didn't know about. Multitasking feature is great but the apps never seem to turn off unless you force close them.

Jameson! Is correct. It's the synchronisation between the battery chip and the device chip that helps battery life not conditioning. But as for turning off services and apps why should we pay £500 for a phone only to kill apps and turn off services which we shouldn't have to. This should never of happened surely it should have been picked up at the IOS 5 beta stages not the end user release. I am disgusted with the battery usage,crashes and heat issues I am having even with a replacement handset. Granted the heat isn't as bad as my other iPhone 4 I had for a year but that's beyond the point.

I also had another original idea for Apple, seeing as so many people are into "standby time" with all stuff turned off.

They could call it the Iphone4Phone!! It uses the same casing and form factor but doesn't do internet or apps. It's just a 3G text/phone with alarm clock and THAT'S IT - ok, it could have maybe 1 game like Gbrainy. It does amazing standby times!!! Plus they could implement a screensaver showing snapshots of well known apps and menus, so it still looks smart!!! Think different!

Also... the Ipager! Full anodized metal casing and clip, resistive touchscreen with stylus for entering text messages, pico projector, walkie-talkie function and Siri/Newton on board!! Again, think different!

A final one, hoping Apple hires me soon... the Itools! Hammer, screwdriver and pliers with Siri on board! Motion statistics, Gbrainy-to-speech game and find feature... "Where's my hammer?"... "I'm here darling"!! Amazing standby times!

Good luck!

Some good news from Wired.com

New iOS 5.0.1 Update ‘Nothing Short of Amazing’

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/11/ios-5-update-improvement/

The article is more balanced than the quote extracted for the title from someone who says this:

“To go almost an entire day without a change in the meter reading seems unbelievable. Where before I could almost watch the battery drain, now it doesn’t move at all.”

So you know right away the guy is a complete idiot. I mean it's not about magic.

“Frankly the difference is nothing short of amazing,” said Wired reader Donald Kuntzman.

Nearly fell off my chair...

I don't really know Wired, but I see they have that title plastered on their main page. Of course they didn't have the guts to have one of their staff members test 5.0.1 beta and quote him. I guess it's very telling about what that magazine stands for, in my opinion. They're wired into a "distortion field".

5 days before the new Iphone 4s came out we purchased the Iphone 4 - my battery life was great.  We decided to go ahead and make the switch to Iphone 4s and no additional fees since we were inside our 14 days.  I have been using my Iphone 4s about a week now and thought it was supposed to have longer battery life.  It is horrible.  My Iphone 4 was great.  My husband said he is having same problem.  Right after I mentioned - News 4 Jax came on and said there was a report that Apple is addressing and updating the processor. 

Does anyone know if the processor will automatically update or if we will have to download ourselves.  We have 3 new Iphone 4s and they are all running through the battery quite fast and hoping for a quick solution.