Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Well, shutting down all the Apps did not work.  In 2.5 hours on standby, the battery lost 10%.   And we are suppose to get 200 hours of standby?  Talk about false advertising!

I know that all these resets and restores and drainings are working for some people, but I have done everything twice and still have a huge problem.  That's what I don't understand. Also, I am not a tech expert  by any  means and I don't think I should have to fix this. Apple should fix it. I am worried about doing more damage to my phone by something I may inadvertently do during a so-called "fix". I think the only thing to do now is wait a couple of weeks and see if Apple speaks on this. If not, then I will have to bring the phone back, as I can't have a phone that goes dead after 4 hours. But I still love Apple. 

My phone was at 88% at 8 am this morning, made 2 phone calls and checked email and now at 1:30 pm by battery is at 67%.  I am not happy with this Apple product.

I am under 30 days of sale, and I am going to try to return and get a Droid! 

I guess I am having same problame since I upgrade to ios5.1. Before upgrade I had no problame but now battery drain very quick.

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My issue still exits after the update to 5.0.1 on a 64GB AT&T 4s.  My issue seems to mainly be the amount of "usage" that the phone uses while I am not actually using the phone on 3G.

Last night, while I was asleep for 8 hours, with Wi-Fi turned on and connected to my home network, the phone reported 20 minutes of usage and the battery dropped from 84% to 79%.

Two nights ago, while I was asleep for 8 hours, with Wi-Fi turned off and a 4 bar 3G connection, the phone reported 2 hours of usage and the battery dropped from 74% to 55%.

I have push email setup for Gmail as an Exchange account and 3 other email accounts setup to fetch every 15 minutes, most location services are off, a few are still on.  It seems that it takes alot more usage time for the phone to check these accounts over 3G than it does over Wi-Fi.  This makes some sense since my Wi-Fi is faster than 3G, but the actual difference in usage time between 3G and Wi-Fi seems to be alot greater than what I expect.

Hello everybody.

In my personal opinion, the battery drain issue on the iPhone 4s is a HARDWARE issue for some of the users reporting problems. There are certainly software issues, like the location-services-associated battery drain, however there is a HARDWARE issue as well.

Want proof? Here's my experience.

Me and my girlfriend both bought an iPhone 4s. I got a black 32 GG, she got a white 16GB phone.

We each had an iPhone 3GS before that, upgraded to IOS 5.0 with iCloud on.

Day 1-5:

I shut down both 3GS, removed the sim cards, put them into the two new 4s and "transferred" all of our settings through iCloud to the new phones.

Result: Both phones' batteries sucked. I read the various forum posts, played around with the settings, deleted icloud, deactivated push, changed the location services, etc. This all brought some help and in the end my black 4s had better battery life than the one of my girlfriend. I changed all settings ob BOTH phones at the same time, in the same way. We both have the same apps installed (actually I have a couple more than my girlfriend has, but she does not have any, that I don't have).

Day 6-9:

The IOS 5.0.1 update arrived. This made battery life marginally better for both phones.

I kept tricking around with the settings more, setting up the phones as new ones twice (and manually adapting all settings, no syncing!), performing a dozen or so "hard" resets, a couple complete battery recharges. This only helped my 4s, my girlfriend's iPhone kept running low on battery very quickly.

Day 10:

Today my black 32 GB iPhone 4s had 30% battery left when I left work in the evening. Its battery had been recharged 50 hours ago for the last time. Wifi&3G were on for over 40 hours during those 50 hours (the other 10 it was on airplane mode). I had used it to surf the net on several occasions, type iMessages, e-mail, facetime and call people 4 times. Push E-mail through Google was on during all that time.

2 days of "normal" use and standby at nights led to 30% of battery left. That's good for me.

My girlfriend's phone had to be recharged overnight yesterday, after having shut itself down because of low battery. I took it off the charger today at 8:00 AM, it had 100% battery left at that point. She called me at work 7 hours later. Her iPhone had 60% battery left. In these 7 hours, she only wrote two short e-mails, the rest of the time the phone was on standby.

She returned it to the mobile company's store today and will get a new one within the next week.

Both iPhones have identical settings, identical apps. We both sync mail from 2 E-mail-Accounts: one ISP-POP3-Server and Google-Mail. Our contacts and calenders are synced through google. I actually use Facebook too with Push on, my girlfriend had't had the opportunity to initiate the app in the past weeks.

I performed all resets, erased the phones, set them up as new ones one after the other. No setting is different on the one phone, than on the other.

And still: One phone has about 3 times more battery life than the other.

For me, this can only mean one: a HARDWARE problem. Are we the only ones experiencing this? Perhaps.

I think however, that some of the users, who have tried EVERYTHING and still didn't see any improvement, may actually have the same problem like us.

This is ridiculous .....

i used my phone my be just for 15 to 20 text messages and 5 minute phone call....

And battery is already almost half drained.. Thats really messed up............

Here are my stats on 4S with iOS 5 (Ihaven’t noticed any change since the upgrade to 5.0.1):

And this is how I came to this:

1. Settings     -> General -> Reset -> Reset All Settings
2. Setup     as a new phone
3. Notifications:     phone, messages, reminders, calendar, mail, FB, BatteryDoctor, IM+, Skype     on
4. iCloud:     everything on except Photo Stream
5. Email:     one iCloud plus 2 Gmail accounts (via MS Exchange) set to push
6. Autolock     set to 1 minute
7. Location     Services: Siri and Find my iPhone are on
8. System     Services: Cell Network Search and Traffic are on
9. WiFi on     but “Ask to Join Networks” off (have only home wifi set up)
10. Auto Brightness     set to 50%

As for the battery maintenance here’s what I did:

1. Let it     drain completely and then fully recharged with power cord using     BatteryDoctor (first time with 10 mins and second time 60 mins Tricle     Charge).
2. Most of     the time I charge my phone when it drops below 10% or even shuts down completely after running out of juice.
3. I     switch the phone off every second full charge in case there are     some background processes running and draining my battery.

Now regarding the phone usage. During the “test”period I:

• Made/received     few phone calls with total up to 20 mins
• Sent 6     iMessages
• Browsed     the net via 3G for about 45 mins
• Browsed     my photos for about 30 mins
• Took 5     photos
• Got     about 15 notifications (mainly from Gmail and FB)
• Sent about     10 short emails
• Simply played     with the phone for 1 hour
• Always had     at least 10 apps running

As I’m still not fully satisfied with the stats I think investigating the battery drain further won’t bring anything good to my current standby/usage figures. I just hope Apple will fix the software issues asap so I don’t have to control myself when using my phone all the time (otherwise what’s the point of having an iphone if you need to carry power cord all along or switch of most of its features that actually make it a smartphone??).

I've read a good 50% of these threads.  I too have the problems, with two phones, and none of the magic "settings" or restores work.  I've tried them all, over and over.

I think what's overlooked (but has been mentioned a number of times) is the problem with a weak 3G signal dramatically affecting the battery life as the phone searches or compensates for a degraded signal.  I'm not an antenna engineer, just my suspicion.

Then, way out there....I'm wondering if WORDS WITH FRIENDS is wreaking havoc on the software bug in IOS 5 that keeps processes running and drains battery.   It's a historically bad app in terms of it's programming.   If there is a weakness in iOS 5 that can be unitentionally exploited by a poorly programmed app - then Words is the #1 candidate!     And, zillions of people of have Words, and many of them keep that app open all the time in memory.      And no, I'm not bashing Words with Friends.  I play it every day and love it.  But the programming and testing of that app is horrifiic.

OK, This is my 4th post on this topic. I have a white 32 Gb Phone (In case anyone from Apple is actually monitoring this thread).  I am getting pretty decent battery life since updating to iOS 5.0.1.  Battery seems to be dropping off at about 1% per hour.  It is a little higher when I use it a lot to look things up on the web, send multiple texts, multiple emails or make long calls.

I have the locations mostly turned off, because Facebook doesn't need to know any more about me than it already does.  I have Siri and  Find My iPhone location turned on. And in System Services I have Cell Network Search  and Compass Calibration both on.  In Notifications I have Messages and Reminders turned on.  The calendar notifies me when I have a reminder set there anyway so I don't need it on the notification's page.  I may change my mind on this over time as I get used to the notifications system, which is great but I am still getting used to it.

At work I turn off WiFi and Bluetooth while in the office because the company WiFi has the things I would need blocked anyway, gmail, facebook, itunes, aol mail, (Pretty much all of the web based email systems are locked out), YouTube, etc. So it's just a drain to have WiFi on anyway.  I wish Apple would authorize someone to create an app that you can single touch the WiFi and BlueTooth off and on from the home page so I didn't have to dig into the settings when I wanted to do this.  This really detracts from the user experience for me so that reason for not allowing it doesn't work.

And I don't use my BlueTooth headset at work anyway.

I have done a couple of full battery drains with full over night recharges which made a bit of a difference for me.  I would not be surprised to find out that there is a glitch in the battery meter on new phones with new batteries that causes it to not set up properly, but that is just an idea of mine and I have no way to prove it.

I also did the Reset All Settings reset in the General settings section.  This allows you to set the phone up as a new one and not lose all of your stuff.  This did make a difference for me.

I will keep an eye on this and see what happens and will wait a few days to update my firmware when Apple finally released 5.0.2.

We all have the same problem although I don't think it's IOS5. I downloaded it my 3GS and my battery life has improved if anything. I wonder if it's just the 16GB 4s that has the problem ?

I agree. I upgraded my two year old 3GS with IOS5 before I recieved my 4S. The software worked fine  on the 3 and if anything the battery life has improved a little. So my 4s is running all the same apps as the 3GS and the battery drains about 2% a minute if use it in any way at all. Everything is turned off, no Siri, push notifications, no data, no wireless, no 3G, etc. etc. it's just a basic phone and it doesn't last the day on standby. If I dare make a call it drains in front of my eyes.

It's got to be to do with the bigger processor. Either way Apple should never have released it without proper testing.