Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I have the same battery problems in my iphone 4s 16gb

One more thing that i don't like actually is that i can't disable 3G like on previous iphones...

My operator doesn't support 3G and i dont need it, but when iphone loses signal it takes roughly 3-5 minutes to catch it back. And i suppose that when there is no signal it begins to search for 3g network first and only when it discovers that there is no 3g it some kind of switches to 2g and catches the network instantly.

Did so after reading your post. Thanks for sharing! Seems to work fine now.

Iphone 4S battery life testing from Friday, Nov.25, 2011, 8am through 8am, Saturday, November 26, 2011:

Goal: buxbuster's standard of 1-2%battery use/hour when idle

Carl's battery diary-08:06am (11.26.11):

• Total time involved in testing: 24hrs, 7mins
  
• Battery level since last charge: 65%

Usage during  this relative period of inactivity included:

• 35 minutes of hotspot(wireless/bluetooth)
  
• 3 minute phone call
• during this hotspot and phone activity mentioned above: battery life indicator dropped from 96% to 82% during 35 minutes of use
• Later that day:
  • Battery life 13 hours into test showed 76%
• This morning (Saturday11.26.11 @ 08:06am) battery indicator @ 65%
• during the overnight hours while idle, phoine connected to carrier's data traffic
• all options not in use were turned off. No location. No alerts. No ICLOUD. No auto fetching of e-mail. 

Message was edited by: Carl Schuler

I'd just like to tell what happened to me. I bought a 4S plugged it in, charged it and did my updates and sat the phone up with contacts, played with it and so on. That evening I went to bed with 51% battery and woke up 7 hours later to a completely dead phone.  I retruned it to the store for an exchange, brought the new one home and didn't plug it in until I had the battery drained down to 2%. Then I plugged it in and didn't touch it till it was 100% charged.

With normal use it took 48 hours to drain it down to 3%, My intentions are to continue this type of conditioning over the next few charges.  So far it seems to be working well, keeping my fingers crossed. :)

Well I've just taken mine back to a "genius" in store, having been told in the store yesterday that the battery problems were definately fixed in the 5.0.1 update, and if I still had problems I should take my phone back. The "genius" said that a 75% drain in 9 hours on standby was what I could expect, his was the same. The a5 processor drains a lot of battery and the next software update will throttle back the processor to get the right balance of power and performance. He was willing to replace my phone but insisted it would make no difference. I said the phone could hardly be called a mobile as it needed charging 2-3 times a day in light use. He said I would have to bear with them while they sort it. I can get it to last almost as long as my 4 did by turning off location services, siri and notifications, but that makes this a real expensive downgrade on my old 4. Not happy

iPhone 4s 64Gb S/No. C39GK...

Third battery cycle.  Fully charged overnight via USB.

Current stats:  97% battery, Usage 13 minutes Standby 4h 11 mins

so (currently) a happy camper.

RB

I Just got a VZW 4S 16 GB on Wednesday. I have all push notifications turned off. I have turned off all Calendar notifications. The only email that I use is iCloud and it is set to fetch once an hour. As far as iCloud settings, the only things that sync are Calendar, Contacts, and Mail. I have Location Services turned off for everything except Siri and Maps. I am connected to a Wifi Network with a strong connection. I have a satisfactory network signal (3 bars). I have an Activity Monitor installed and when all my apps are closed it never jumps above 11% (which seems fine), so it is not stuck in a crash loop.

Everything seems to be perfectly normal.

My battery life is STILL awful. It drops about 9% AN HOUR. And thats with minimal use. If I send a SINGLE text message or open Facebook or Twitter for a few minutes, I experience a 1% per MINUTE drop.

I love the phone. But this is completely unacceptable. I will return it if there is not some sort of fix VERY soon.

If anyone could help me in anyway, I would be eternally grateful.

Do you have iMessage enabled? Try turning it off in message settings and see if that changes anything.

Did you try any of the workarounds?

1. Deselect wifi-sync in iTunes ( IF enabled ) if that doesn't work : on to number 2 :

2. Remove iCloud, reset network settings in your iPhone, if that doesn't work , on to number 3 :

3. General/Reset/Reset all settings

These seem to work for some. Let us know which one worked ( or not )

Regards.

I may have found something. I had Twitter disabled in my notifications, but got a tweet today that popped up on my home screen. Didn't know I had this enabled. At the bottom of the Twitter notification settings is the home scrren toggle. Since disabling this, battery life seems better. Considering there is no setting for frequency of checking for tweets, it appears the phone is continually connecting to wifi to check for new tweets.

jmm514 wrote:

 

I may have found something. I had Twitter disabled in my notifications, but got a tweet today that popped up on my home screen. Didn't know I had this enabled. At the bottom of the Twitter notification settings is the home scrren toggle. Since disabling this, battery life seems better. Considering there is no setting for frequency of checking for tweets, it appears the phone is continually connecting to wifi to check for new tweets.

This is so interesting. I believe Apple should enforce this: turning off notification for an app should prevent it from polling the network, and should supersede the app setting. Furthermore, Apple should force devs to include a frequency setting for every app that polls the network, otherwise the app should be barred from the store. An app that has no frequency setting is just wrong. The user should always have the choice.

gordonfrombasingstoke wrote:

 

[...]

The "genius" said that a 75% drain in 9 hours on standby was what I could expect, his was the same.

[...]

That "sans genie" genius was simply wrong, his setup is problematic and so is yours. He should grow a cortex and tone his arms. This sort of standby time is just unacceptable and many users here have had far better standby time than that i.e. 0.47-3% drain per hour. This could yield something like 4-5hrs mixed usage with 20hrs standby for instance or something like that...

Repost:

Generally if I charge my phone before going to bed, I usually awaken with maybe 96% or 97% battery (if I sleep 8-9 hrs.).  But the other day, I charged my phone to 100% just before going to bed and I set my phone to alarm in the morning.  This was the first time I used the alarm app.  I noticed in the morning that the usage increased considerably overnight and the battery reading was down to 83%.

The usage reading was 8 hours, ?? minutes.  Actually, this was about the same number of hours from the time I set the alarm to my being awakened by the alarm in the morning.  This seems to indicate that the phone was actively in use (like talking, messaging, gaming, internet browsing, etc.) from the time the alarm app was set to when it alarmed.

Is this normal?

No it is not. The usage during standby should be a few minutes per hour at most. Actually, Apple defines "usage time" as the things you said AND "background processing, such as auto-checking of email" - but they don't define it further... it's never only usage by the user per se. In your case, what's weird is that there is tons of usage, yet little drain - I mean there was more drain than usual, but 17% in 8hrs is about 2% per hour, which is higher than the listed 0.5% drain per hour on standby, yet nothing compared to real drain issues some users have had (10% and such).

Is it iCloud related? Wifi-sync? A new app that polls? Sirii IR issue? iMessage? Your guess is as good as mine - many of the last posts refer to these elements. Maybe others can help. Maybe put your phone in airplane mode or cellular data off while you sleep if you can't figure it out to alleviate the symptoms in the meantime.

Good luck!

I had no battery problems until I "upgarded" to 5.0.1. I used my phone once today to check a voicemail and once to check email and my battery is down to 58%. It seems to be losing 1% every few minutes.