Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Grisswalo and Racinjason67 - how many calendars and/or AddressBooks do you subscribe to with OTA synch'ing and what service are they hosted on (iCloud, Google, Apple 10.6 or 10.7 server)?  Are either of you using Exchange for email?  If not, what email services are you using, is Push on or off and/or what is your fetch interval.

OzziesMac - I have that option on, didn't see the GPS come on at all today and was burning battery life like crazy.

I have 5 calendar accounts, 3 address book accounts and email on an IMAP server (First Class).  Everything is set to fetch at a 1 hour interval.  If I delete the calendar and AB accounts I get normal battery life.  With them I get terrible life, irrespective of whether I do a factory restore or work from my  upgraded settings.

Clearly, a lot of people are having this both with 4s (which came with iOS 5.0) and with 4 (after "upgrading" to iOS 5.0, and even after disabling functions that are new in 5.0.) So the problem is obviously in iOS 5.0.

Until Apple has a fix for this problem and the other one my wife encountered "upgrading" (loss of all data, cannot restore) I certainly will keep with the iOS I have.

I too had terrible battery life on my 4s, barely making it thru the day-- until a friend of mine with a Thunderbolt Android phone said i probably needed to condition the battery like he had to.  You do this by letting the phone's battery drain all the way until it shuts down, then charging it to 100% using the wall charger (NOT USB).  After doing this twice, battery life has increased dramatically and is now at least as good as it was on my iPhone 4 with Bluetooth and wifi on all the time. Now I have a good 50% battery at the end of an 11 hour shift! :) hope this helps.

This is very insightful.  I already had Setting Time Zone turned off and my GPS indicator didn't show at all... I tried turning Setting Time Zone on and it didn't immediately turn the indicator on though...  I also tried turning on Ask to Join Networks and that didn't set off any indicators either...

If it is as some of us theorized though... When we leave the comfort of our steady wifi connection at home, the phone searches for gps to keep our apps "running" and it also searches for wifi networks to assist these functions.  I bet these two settings would set off indicators as soon as I left my home.

I will try to do this in the morning and get back to people.  If I tested it would be a good indicator because my battery life has been very good as of late (as indicated above).

It would certainly be very helpful for other people to test and report back as well.

I had also tried turning off notifications, location services, seri, etc and the phone would just drain the battery sitting on my desk, unlike any previous iPhone I've owned! But the results were amazing after conditioning the battery--like night and day! Tho I haven't tried setting a "geo fence" reminder, that's bound to be a serious power drain.

I bought 4 Sprint 4S's. One has battery problems. The other 3 seem fine. At least in my case, this doesn't seem to be a software or settings issue as all 4 phones are set up the same.  Maybe there is just a bunch of bad batterys.

ferris666 wrote:

 

I bought 4 Sprint 4S's. One has battery problems. The other 3 seem fine. At least in my case, this doesn't seem to be a software or settings issue as all 4 phones are set up the same.  Maybe there is just a bunch of bad batterys.

Except there are a ton of people who upgraded their iP4 (not 4S) to iOS 5 who are also complaining about poor battery life - even after setting it up as a new phone (not backup).

While 1 of your 4 phones might indeed have a defective battery, there is definitely a software issue with iOS 5 and I'm guessing that your other 3 phones will start to exhibit sporadic battery life issues in the near future.

My fiance and I just got back from out week vacation. We both upgraded to the iPhone 4S (32gb black and 64gb white). The whole trip was a huge pain with this point.

The first day we got to the hotel we had been charging the phones in the car. By the time we checked in and got to our rooms we'd lost 15% battery life with no applications running in the background.

That same day we continued to let the iPhones recharge and by the time we arrived at Howl O Scream they were at 100%. During the first 3 hours of being at the park we had taken a handful of pictures, always making sure to lock the phone back. After 3 hours, I went to use my phone and noticed it dead. Using it for nothing but less than a dozen pictures, it was dead that quick.

Throughout the entire trip we were plagued by the horrible battery life. Often, I was forced to turn off every single feature of the phone, essentially leaving an expensive brick. Only then did the battery life finally stop dropping like crazy.

Thankfully, other people in our vacation group brought their own phones and or cameras so we still able to capture most of the moments. Although, we forgot our charge cable one night and almost didnt have enough battery power to use maps to navigate around town.

It was pathetic and embarresing that we'd just spent all this money on these new devices and couldnt even keep them powered for more than a couple of hours.

I am going to return them next week if I dont hear of rumors of fixes coming down the line ASAP!

Edit:

Please, PLEASE tell me the following link is not Apples response:

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html

Was this page available prior to all the problems?

This sure as **** better not turn into another Antennagate/You're holding it wrong situation!!!

JonGoldman, I am subscribed to the Facebook Calendar, Google Calendar and Windows Live Calendar and they all work through iCloud.  I have my Address Book from Google/Gmail and from Windows Live.  I don't use Exchange.  I have two Windows Live emails (one from school) and a Gmail account running through my phone.  It turns out that I only have push setup for iCloud and everything else is set to "Fetch".  I didn't set any push options on my mail... I guess, because of the way I set up my email through Mac OSX Lion to all come through the mail app, the email was automatically setup for me on my phone.  I hope this helps.  I haven't been having a problem, but I have the desire to learn (and help others get to the bottom this).  Let me know how it turns out.

I'm a software engineer and noticed my exchange calendars flickering within the new notification screen. Disabling and reenabling the calendars seems to improve the situation. I think a software application in the background was crashing or not behaving correctly.

Battery life improved but wasn't great, so I tried - what some other people have recommended - to delete my email accounts from the phone. I then readded my gmail account (via exchange sync, includes mail, contacts and calendars), and my iCloud account. The battery life seems to be greatly improved.

I think deleting the email and iCloud accounts, then adding them again may be a decent fix.

Regards,

Ryan

Hardware: iPhone 4S 64GB AT&T

Fetch New Data: Manual

Time since last full change

    Usage; 1 hr 28 minutes

    Standby: 10 Hours 36 minutes

    Percentage Left: 77%

Location Services: On

I think that a lot of the problems people are having with their battery can pretty much be directed at programs which are keeping network connections open -- with those experiencing the worst drains when the connection is via their carrier data network (as opposed to wifi). Sometimes, it may even be a background process that got hung.

The first thing you can try is to do (temporarily) turn off all programs requiring any network connection (whether wireless or through your carrier data network) and then power off your phone (press and hold the power button at the top of the phone until you see the option to shut your phone down). This will force all programs to end, including the programs which may be causing problems with battery drain. If need be, delete your mail accounts too (back up your contacts, of course) and later you can re-add them.

After turning off the phone, turn it back on. One-by-one, turn back the network options you need and re-add your mail accounts, and keep the settings as conservative as possible (e.g. unless you have to have minute-by-minute updates on your mail, use 1-hour fetches). For some folks, this will be all you need to do to get your battery working normally.

If that doesn't work, then fully charge your phone, repeat the process above with the network settings, and then drain your battery completely (as in, keep it running even at 1% until it forces itself to shut down). Fully charge your phone, and redo your network settings to how you would like it to be set up. Most folks should see their battery behaving normally at this point.

If neither of those steps above worked, then try a hard reset, back up your data, and then do a clean restore.

Ok so I've been monitoring the thread. Tweaked the phone etc etc. Definitely noticed improvement with standby time by conditioning the battery.

One thing no one mentions is the antenna. I may be way off but doesn't the 4S have two antenna? What if it's accessing both at the same time and therefore we are seeing the excessive power drain?

May be, it's only a wrong calculation of the Battery-Status. Since I calibrated it by loading from 0% to full, everything seems to be ok. After 2 Days and 6 hours of use, I'm still on 30%. Everything is on, Location, iCloud, eMail, WLAN.

GOOD POINT FOR THE 2 ANTENNA

Well I've tried everything including two dry restores

I turned the automatic carrier selection off and manually selected my network beig Vodafone.

I'm hesitant to say this has had a very big effect so much so I'd say my battery life is now normal.

Has anyone tried this ?????