Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I think I have solved the problem people!

You need to drain the battery competely! And I mean completely. Even when it keeps saying plug in power keep restarting it, do this 100 or so times and the battery will be completely flat. Just taken mine off charge at 90% and after 15 mins full usage on safari and music,it hasn't gone down at all!

Updates will follow!

So you have drained your battery first.  After draining the battery you restarted your iPhone 100 times?  And then you recharged the phone to 90%??

is that correct?

5th post on this topic.  I was getting better battery life on my 32 GB White iPhone 4s (Not sure if the memory or color have anything to do with the other components that may be killing the battery if there are any)

I did a "Reset All Settings" reset and set up as a new phone to turn everything off as a baseline.  I shut down all location services except Siri and Find My iPhone, and besides Facebook and Twitter don't need to know any more about me than they already do. 

In System Services I only have Cell Network Search and Compass Calibration turned on. In notifications I have Messages  as only option turned on.  If Apple gets this worked out I hope to have more of the notifiers turned on as that was one of the new iOS 5 features that I really liked but we can only wait and see.

Not using iCloud at all.  The only thing I may use it for is the Reminders app. Not sure why it needs access to the cloud to work but apparently it does so no Reminders for me.

I was getting pretty good battery life but thought I would do a Network Reset to clear out those buffers and see if that would help.

My battery was running down pretty quickly this morning so I went back through all my settings to see what might be up. And I managed to not go back in and turn off Siri Raise To Speak!!!!  I just turned that off and I will see if that really is a problem.  The IR sensor may be turned on when ever the screen is on which really draws down the battery.

I believe part of the problem is that the phone is not properly charging.  I did a full discharge last night and left it on the charger overnight.

When I checked it this morning at 6:30 am (after 10 hours of charging), it actually showed the battery life at 94%.  I disconnected and reconnected.  At 7:30 am, it showed 100% when I took it off the charger.  Right now (2+ hours later), I am at 96% with light/moderate use.

I think the issue is that the phone is showing a much higher battery percentage (for example, I was already back at 84% last night after only charging for about 90 min) than actual.  Also, I believe there is a software problem with the software thinking the battery is charging when it actually is not.  When my battery showed 94% while charging this morning, it believed that it was on the charging when in reality it was slowly discharging.

Unfortunately, I tried the restore to factory defaults twice, each time on different computers, and on two different phones, and no luck.

@thematch - There is probably a problem with the battery meter and the new batteries in our phones.  I think this is a software glitch in iOS 5.x so far.  I have done a couple of total discharges (run it down til it shuts down and then plug it in over night to give it a full charge.  I also turn the phone off while it is charging so that nothing is running in the background to drain the phone while it should be charging.  This gets me up to 100% and I think this form of conditioning a Lithium battery is supposed to actually help its over all performance and lifespan. 

I also have a 32GB but a black phone.  But I feel the battery life on my phone is excellent comparing all the complains I'm hearing online and here.  I also have a lot of the services on - at least more than what you have on. After chargning full 100% when I pick it up in the morning, I only loose 2% charge .. so from that I have to say so far so good with my phone.

one of the posts mentioned to discharge .. try discharging the phone to nothing and then rechage it and see if that improves anything.

Like many of the other poisters, I updated my software yesterday and the patch has made things INCREDIBLY WORSE.  The problem was bad before, but now it is unbelievable.   The battery has dropped from 100% ro 79% in about 2 hours.   I have barely used the phone (listened to one voicemail, sent and received two texts, and checked email once).  And it is saying I have 1 hour, 58 minutes of usage, and 2 hours, 5 mins of standby!

Going to the apple store thurs to return.  I can't deal with this anymore.

Initially I had a 10%/hr drain, shocking ofcourse.

Since I disabled some of the Locationfeatures and did a COMPLETE drain, my battery improved everyday. The battery was so drained, that it would not even start during the first 5 minutes of charging. Hence, it took pretty much time to go from 1% till it died.

Now my battery life went from 10 hours to 2 days with normal use.

Give it a try, let your battery completely die.

1AppleADayNoWay wrote:

 

MeMeMeMeMe wrote:

 

[...]

 

I couldn't afford to hang on though, not when I hear (secondhand I admit) some people being told by Apple employees that they should be satisfied with 20 - 30 hours of standby time.  I'd be willing to settle for 100 hours standby time (less if I were to use the phone a lot) for a phone without third-party apps, which is still half of what Apple has advertised for the 4x.

 

I really commend your analysis. As you've referred to the usage time definition, it includes what Apple calls "background processing such as auto-checking mail" - obviously something out of control in your case. But I wanted to comment on the 20-30hrs standby time people should expect. I find it's some form of acknowledgement by those employees that with most users - contemporary heavy users - this is a 1 day device at most (and an Apple "day" would be about 30 hours instead of 24 lolll). In the sense that such users, with a flawless non draining phone, will use easily up to 80-90% of the battery in a day - 5-6hrs mixed 3G internet/call. And with 10-20% battery left, you should have 20-40hrs standby time on top of that (0.5% per hour x 200 = 100%)... as standby time can only exist in relation to what's left of the battery... maybe they meant something like that...

 

... in fact the more I think about it the more I feel that's right, as a pattern I often see with someone who has a normal phone is 5-6hrs usage/ 22-24hrs standby.

Yeah, just to be clear, in the tests I did where battery drained to less than 10 % in 17 hours with absolutely no use of the phone, I also deleted my iCloud account, and I never set up any e-mail whatsoever.  Oh yeah, push was turned off too, even though I had no calandar or contact syncs, either.  And pretty much all the other relevant services for which one would use a smartphone were turned off too (location services, etc..).  Pretty much, the phone was just sitting there 3 feet from my wireless router looking like a lump of coal, but apparently spending 80 - 90 % of the time in "usage."  Why?  Not really sure.

I'd be willing to live with a phone that could make it through two days with light use.  I think a phone rated for 200 hours standby time should be able to muster that.  Not the experience I had with the phone I returned, but others may have more luck.  I'll wait and see where Apple takes this.

are you sure? I dont really believe you. I have done this draining the battery thing many times but it has never improved

After all the complains and my research, it sounds like to me this may be a hardware problem. I have friends using iphone 4 and friends using 4s including me. 4s consumes approximately double the battery life of 4 under vigourous comparisons. This is completely unmatched with Apple's claim about the phone supposed battery life.

If 4s uses the A5 chip which consumes more energy, its battery has to be modified accordingly to suit its use. So I guess we just have to get a refund... or Apple may have to consider mass iphone recruitment and redistribution.

Does anyone know how to check when the last day is to get a refund?

sorry forgot to mention another problem with i have had with my phone which i have added to the bullet points.

Also in reply to other people post's i have charged my iphone 4s 5 times since new and everytime always let the battery go down to a minimum of 4% and then charged via usb/pc. I have not had a terrible battery compared to some users but it is still far from anticipated.

Also i have just reset all of the setting in hope this will improve things.

my 4s battery seemed to be ok once i had disabled the time zone and used the other tips posted on this site but just like alot of people since updating to ios 5.0.1 my battery seems to have gotten worse and im losing 2% a minute when browsing on home wifi

other problems that i have include:

• phone has lost the network signal and goes into search mode on no less than 8 occasions.
• phone seems to have the same signal bars as my 4 did.
• internet browsing is not very consistent when using 3g.
• i have also been unable to send txt messages at times, i have found that the send bar has gone near the end but is unable to progress any further and results in a red exclamation mark being shown.

i understand when bringing out a new model that there are always minor problems but everything that has been upgraded to be better than the 4 doesnt seem to be.

To those you who have been reporting battery is not completely charging, the problem is probably not the meter.  Once the battery gets to about 90% charge, the charger goes into trickle charge mode.  If your device is hanging on a process, or trying to aquire a 3G signal, or "fill in the blank" the charging rate is probably <= to the discharge rate and cannot go any higher. 

THis is all just stupid, next thing I'm going to see on here is some fool saying you have to stand on your left foot, hop up and down, tap yourself on the top of your head while chanting an Arapahoe Indian rain dance hymn...

and sadly, people here will DO IT thinking that it'll work. UGH.

People, your phones are F--KED! STOP WASTING YOUR TIME AND OURS.  APPLE NEED TO ADDRESS THIS!

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE TO GO THROUGH THIS TO GET A PHONE TO WORK CORRECTLY!

My god man, are people really THIS stupid?