I have installed IOS5.0.1 and I am not sure there is much difference in the battery life. Although to be honest thru this forum, I am not sure what the expecations are for the battery life anymore...I notice that once u start dropping battery life, it starts dropping quickly...its very hard to figure out whats going on and why this is happening. Can anyone clarify a hard reset? do I need to be connected to Itunes for that?

When installing the update it states that it should deal with the battery life issues. I guess will see if more is coming or this is the end of the line for the 4s...

I have spoken to several Apple Care people who have all said they are "embarrassed" by the incomprehensibility of this issue. My friend works for Apple, he is just as lost as anyone here. His phone is also having issues. He believes another update will be coming up very very soon, but he says that there is no merit or basis in which he makes that assumption.

I have turned off everything, essentially, I am back to an iPhone 4, which is what I have for my personal line. I own an iphone4 and 4s and now they are identical, except for one thing... My iPhone 4 still goes 4 days without a charge!. My 4s is dead before I've finished breakfast.

I am an Apple Fanboy. I love everything they do. I am a die hard fan. I'm in $10,000 so far in their product support and ownership. I own their stock. Yet, I faithfully and strongly say that this is absolute ******** and that it is evident that this phone was rushed out. This would not have stood if Steve was still here. This is ONE thread of 100 which have 100's of pages of complaints. Most are even after the 5.0.1 update. This has got to be handled immediately. If a live and die Mac man like myself is switching to a blackberry so that I can continue my job's heavy Phone use requirements, that's bad news.

Most people aren't as loyal as I, so if I'll leave, I'm sure Droid sales are headed skyward. Other manufacturers are smiling as hard as when the antenna issue was plaguing us.

"iPhone4s... the most amazing iPhone yet... for a couple hours a day."

Dr Strangep0rk,

Please explain how your iphones get twice the battery life of what Apple specs say? 48 hours of use without a recharge?

At best they can only do 8 hours of 3G talk time.

Everyone else has battery capacity BELOW Apple's specs. How is it that yours is so much HIGHER than the specs?

How are you using your phones differently than eveyone else?

My experience seems better than most, yet I'm down to 50% after 11 hours with less than 20 minutes of talk. And 0% loss when the phone is idle.

Please enlighten us on this anomaly.

Hi All,

I've posted a list of things on how-to fix your battery.  Go here to find out!

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3487489

Update: After hard reboot twice and turning off apps not being used (double click home button), using iPhone4S with IOS5.0.1...it was still eating 10% of battery life in an hour with NO use...just in stand-by/sleep mode.

So, I wiped the phone, wiped all apps and information and started as if brand new out of the box...just finished restoring using the iCloud encrypted backup...now it is at 100% battery at 8:22pm EST. I will be back in an hour to reveal how much batter life has been used. Thanks, drStrangeP0rk.

My guess is that there are 2 issues here and Apple hasn't sorted this out.

Issue 1 is the background battery drain which is running all the phones down and is software.

Issue 2 is a battery capacity issue. Either Apple was outrageously optimistic in it's usage estimates OR, it has installed either defective batteries or batteries of lower capacity than what they called for.

Apple WILL fix this when it can get to the bottom of the problem. Right now there is a lot of anecdotal information, most of which, in this forum, is unhelpful and non-specific. There are just too many possible configurations of Apps, countries, and cellular services to narrow the problem down quickly.

But since no one reads my posts, no one will be imbibed with my wisdom!

I read it. Issue 2 doesn't really seem to be the issue since we iPhone4 users still have the same battery as before. And the battery issues seem to be the same for 4 users and 4S users. Am I misunderstanding?

Well, for what it's worth, here's how things went for me. Only had phone a couply days before I got the 5.01 update. As of Thursday night, the phone would actually drain and power down overnight while on standby. Very dismaying. So although I performed this three times, I did a hard reset this afternoon (Power button and Home button for 10 seconds until white apple appears), then I plugged phone into wall charger until it hit 100%, then I removed it.

The phone held like 100% for over an hour straight (it was dropping 15% per hour). Oer this one hour, I had received a few texts, and read about 10 emails from ths forum. Seems to be holding strong and behaving now.

So moral of the story is, don't be afraid to do a few hard resets if not successful.

I tend to let the battery drain all the way on any device with a battery. Day one we charged them for 24 hours no activity. Then we loaded them up, we are using iCloud and as developers have played with iTunes Match. By the end of day 2 our power is under 10%. Very little talking since we are not phone gals/guys but lots of network, 15 minute check for email checks.

I have had a similar experience powerbooks, if they battery is manage properly, allowed to dicharge and gets a full charge I get usually better that the specs.

****, one of my first gen iPad goes almost 4 days with the same APP as others.

Folks,

Just don't go by how much the battery is down. COMPARE IT TO THE SPECS!!

HELLO?????

Get a free battery monitor app which will tell you how much time of whatever activity you can do. THEN DO THAT FOR A WHILE AND SEE WHAT HAPPENS!

If it says "5 hours of talk 3G" then try to talk for an hour and see how much juice that eats.

Give us perspective! How much worse is it than the expected life? The optimistic numbers Apple advertises are under "optimum" conditions. UP TO 200 hours, etc. Means very little.

But video, internet, music, and talk are more quantifiable. PLEASE TEST!

BTW, my 4S was draining sitting on the nightstand. Now, after the update, and a couple of battery drain cycles, it's sitting here watching me type and not draining at all.

I had the same problem today......I had to recharge my phone twice today which is rediculous and its not that I use it so heavily i was just listenin to music and few texts here and there, I did not even call anybody......I see loads of people saying that they should shut certain options in the phone, then how does it make a SMARTPHONE ??

I would rather buy a simple phone(which way too cheaper) and use it for general option, why would i go for Iphone which is supposedly the best around.....

I really hope apple comes up with some solution for this as never in my life i had the need to carry a charger and charge it twice in 24 Hrs.....

Hey Sign,

Well I don't think it's the same issue. The iOS 5 may be causing a drain with the i4 and that could explain those problems. But it seems like there isn't enough capacity to do what Apple says the 4S can do.

And even if the batteries in the 4 and 4S are the same (and I don't know that they are) Apple may have gotten a bad bunch. Or the current draw for the 4S is much higher with the different chips than what Apple thought.

Also, I wonder if the problem is happening more on the GSM phones than the CDMA. It seems like it is. A lot of people from the UK posting here.

James, not all of us are privy to that sort of testing. Instead of yelling, perhaps you could explain (dumbing it down) exactly what you are talking about and how to do it. I'm not a techy kind of guy and comparing it to the specs doesn't mean a lot to me. I compare it to how the iPhone has performed for me for the last number of years. Compared to that...I've been experiencing a nose-dive like performance with my battery. Just my 2 cents.

James said: "Well I don't think it's the same issue. The iOS 5 may be causing a drain with the i4 and that could explain those problems. But it seems like there isn't enough capacity to do what Apple says the 4S can do."

Me: Possibly, but then how can we explain that some 4 users are experiecing "fixes" with reboot/wiping their phones? Seems if the batteries were different, a reboot fix wouldn't work. Or would it? *shrugs* I have no idea, I'm just speculating! LOL All I know is that I want my phone to work like before. Having it die in less than 5 hours is NOT acceptable.

Update: second test after wiping the phone...it's been nearly 30 minutes and I"m still at 100%! Perhaps I found my fix??

Shail,

See, this is the problem. Apple's specs can't take into account every users' habits. Someone may have 50 apps, 20 using location services, while streaming music via 3G, which I would imagine, would drain much faster than the specs say.

The specs probably don't account for loading power eating apps.

The accounts in this forum have too many variables to really get a good handle on what's going on.

So why am I here typing away? Dunno. I should be watching TV.