Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Just returned from Apple Store. 

Guy went back to do a test, came back and told me there was nothing wrong with it and told me I needed to change some settings on the phone.  I told him I knew what he was going to tell me which I had already done during the week, but this morning I had restored my phone to see if that would fix the problem.  I did a fresh restore, used no back up.  In 3 hours my phone went down 28%. 

So since he wouldn't exchange it I just left because I was in a rush to get home.  And he wanted me to chang settings I had forgotten to re-set after I restored this morning.

Going to try calling Apple Care again today.  Tried earlier but the wait was pretty long and I didn't want to keep wasting my minutes on it. So will call from house phone later.

Thanks a lot Apple...

Same issue here on the 3 network in the UK.  Saw a drop in battery performance once my iPhone 4 was upgraded to IOS5 but not so bad as the 4s, it has had to be charged every night whereas the 4 would be every other night, now lucky if the 4s lasts the day.

Today it got down to 4% and shutdown, previous days it has gone to 2% before shutdown.  Also noticed the extra heat over and above that of the 4.

Two guys at work also have new 4s's anf they claim battery life to be excellent, does the problem appear to differ across networks?  Would be interested to hear from others on the UK networks, my battery life on 3 is poor yet O2 and Vodafone apparently very good......

Have tried cutting down email accounts and turning functions off but doesn't appear to improve the situation, I know a couple of days isn't brilliant but I would love to have that level of battery life now on my new 4s.

Come on Apple, help us out here.

Scarface i feel your pain with the 3gs, your 4s might hsve a hardware problem if you  have checked all of your settings, i run edge, no wifi, no anything so my battery life is 100% but it still dies almost every day. Just use it like you normally do and if it dies everyday talk to apple within a week so ghat they can find out if it is a hardware problem because that would be my guess

I just received my 4S (BLK 32GB) on Friday and have noticed the same problem. I also noticed the same problem after upgrading to iOS5 on my 3GS, but I initially thought that it was just my phone growing old and dying. But given everyone's comments, it sure seems that a iOS5 software bug is more likely. As one initial test, I put my 3GS in Airplane mode a couple of days ago and it is still at 91% charge. With iOS5 and not on airplane mode, it would run down overnight.

I have done many, many suggestions on this thread. I've conditioned my batter. I've restored my phone twice. I have everything turned off I can think of. The ONLY location setting I have turned on is "find my iPhone" because what good is having that service if it's turned off? I've exhausted everything to defray the draining of my battery on my new 4s. In 5 hours time today, it's lost 30% battery with a few text messages. No phone calls, no facebook. No nothing else.  No web browsing.  Nada. I started out at 40% when I woke and it's now at 10%.  Oh and it was at 60% when I went to sleep last night. It lost 20% overnight.

I'm on voda and am experiencing excelerated battery drain issues.

Tried everything quite literally, waiting on a fix from apple but failing that I'm getting rid.

I'd ask that you guys start paying attention to your actual usage vs. the usage the iPhone is claiming.  Yesterday I used my phone for a grand total of about 1 hour tops after unplugging it from a full charge, including a 24 minute phone call and a few texts, checking email a couple of times, etc.  Nothing more.  Around mid-day my battery was down to around 50% and the phone was claiming I had 3 hours 57 minutes of usage.  There is NO WAY I had my phone out of standby for more than about 60 minutes total - nowhere near the claimed usage.

I've done 3 full drain/calibrations, turned off just about everything possibe (location services, iCloud, etc, etc) and had previously done a DFU restore and set the 4S up as new, none of which have helped.

Today, I unplugged my phone from a full charge this morning and went out shopping for about 3-4 hours.  In that time, I looked at my email inbox 1-2 times and read/responded to less than 5 texts and pulled up google maps once to look for a store on the map.  This combined 10 minutes or so of usage had already caused my battery to drop to around 80%.

I'm starting to suspect that push & my Exchange email accounts are the culprit, so I've finally turned off push and set them to manual.  We'll see if this yields any improvement, but I literally have tried every other tip anyone has suggested here and on MacRumors.  I really think the problem is related to something running in the background or causing the phone to come out of standby on it's own, as my phone's claimed usage numbers do not mesh at all with my actual usage.

I'm on Vodafone too. Already requested a return. Will happily get rid of 4S and wait for fix before considering an upgrade. Shame really as I'm really impressed with the response times for the 4S but really can't cope with such short battery life.

I'm on the 3 network in the UK as well, and experiencing somewhat weak battery performance (however it's not that serious as I read others have)

I went through settings and found that the Location indicator for system services is turned off by default. I enabled that and quickly realised that timezone detection _always_ makes the location icon purple (which I think means that it's constantly querying and trying to determine my location). I disabled access to Location services for the timezone detection and the icon immediately disappeared. Let's hope this will fix my battery life issues, will see how it goes.

I' having the problem as well (4S 32GB on T-Mobile Germany). Phone now is on 34% and shows 13 hours standby with 8 hours usage - real usage however was only an hour or so. Does anyone know what counts as usage? Any activity out of standby?

DFU restore didn't help by the way. Tried nearly everything that came up in this thread, however, nothing helped! Phone has been charged five times from 0 - 100% now.

My old iPhone 4 with iOS 5 is just fine and does not experience the battery drain.

I too have noticed the discrepancy between actual usage and what the phone is claiming.  I'll pay more attention after I complete this discharge cycle (this is now my 5th full discharge/recharge cycle).

Hey guys,

I thought I share my experience with Iphone 4S too. So, I got this phone on the day it was released. And I didn't have extreme battery issues and still don't. But I am definitely not happy with the run time on the battery. My usage is roughly 20 texts, checking e-mails 8-10 times a day and just reading news in the mrning on BBC app and calling 2 or 3 times maximum and yeah short calls like 3-4 minutes. Now my battery last for almost a day. By the time i finish work and coem back home it's almost around 50-60% with let's say 2-3 hours usage. And i also noticed something as soon as i start using my phone regardless what I am doing it just eats battery like, it's lunch time. And to expermint i installed angry birds and contract killer, and whenever i play these games the battery drainage is extreme. I haven't tried but I am sure if i continue playing a game on 100% battery, It's nto going to last more than 1.5 hours and will be dead(which is absolutely ridiculous).

Now yesterday, I finally thought that I am goign toerase my iphone and back up from iCloud, so I did. Now to test it I charged my phone to 100% this morning. And just right now my usage is 19 minutes and standbytime is 3 hrs. 13 mins. and the battery just turned to 99%. Now this is peerhaps not too bad and a little better than before. But the interesting thing i noticed that why it's not draining it crazy is because my phone is on wifi, because I am at home and connects to wifi. If I had the same scenerio and my phone wasn't connected to wi-fi, I bet my battery with these stats. would be close to 94-95%. And i have few location services on too. Mail set to push and siri raise to speak and nothing much off. Because to me what's the point of having a smartphone like this if you turn of everything. I might as well buy a cheap phone and don;t have to hefty bill as well.

So, the bottom line is I think italso has to do something with the usage of 3G. The 4S model seems to me like an apple experiment before they release their iPhone 5. They included some high tech features to see how it survives like siri, iCloud and A5 chip.

But what I am rading people experiencing 28%, 50% drainage in 4-5 hours on standby, you guys got a defected one. Because I can compare it to my own and definitely there's comething wrong with those phones. You guys should call apple and at least get a replacement until they fix it to the next level with an iOS or something. Because  it's definitely some collaboration between softwares that's not working out good for teh battery and they are on most of the times and eating battery.

And I am sure they are working on to make it better but the phone's performance is horrible until then.

When you came home and used the device 2-3 hours, what usage was reported by the phone? I can't imagine it's a hardware problem because of those incorrect usage values.

It's not a hardware issue.  My 4S is bad and my sister's battery life has gotten significantly worse on her iP4 (not 4S) after upgrading to iOS5.  I made her setup iOS 5 as a new phone - not from a backup.

This is definitely not a hardware problem.

Agree with horrible battery life. My son's identical 4gs lasts like the old 4, mine dies after a few hours with the same set up. His is white, mine black. He's running ios5 and runs Siri through the paces, perhaps bad run of batteries