Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

Although I don't understand all the technical stuff, I appreciate what you're trying to accomplish here. I am in my 5th day of 4S ownership and have been reading here in the forum for the past 3 days, trying to find out about the battery drain problem.  I have tried most all of the tweaks and workarounds.  Since getting the phone to 100% this morning, I have been logging battery drain.  Not all the time spans are equal, but one can definitely see what's going on. It is now in process of the second complete drain/recharge cycle. I have deleted iCloud, as I didn't use it anyway. Probably part of the drain is due to the many many times I have accessed 'settings' to do all this stuff! I made ONE phone call today, otherwise the phone has been completely idle.

9:15am          100%        

10:45               97     1.5 hrs.          3%

11:15               95     45 min.          2

noon                92     45 min.          3

12:30pm           89     30 min           3

1:45                 85     1.25 hrs         4

2:40                 80     1 hr.              5

3:50                 75     40 min           5

5:20                 66     1.5 hrs.          9

7:00                 61     1 hr. 40 min    5

8:45                 54     1.75 hrs          7

10:30               48     1.75  "            6

11:00               46   

11:30               44     30 min            2

I think that battery life has improved slightly since yesterday, but still it seems not good at all.  I hope these numbers will help your 'cause' and would appreciate your opinion of my listing.

Thanks in advance

As patient as you were logging it all, it is all but useless. Surely buxbuster will comment on your stuff but let me make some preliminary remarks:

• You have lost 56% over 14hrs, or about 2.5% per hour on average. Even though this could be lower, it is nowhere near the real drain issues some users were dealing with i.e. 10%+ per hour
• The battery indicator has been known to be unreliable under some scenarios, and may not report things in a linear way - hence the uselessness of per hour logging.
• Playing with the device accounts for some usage and then it is not "standby" - you will never get 0.5% while playing with the GUI. Plus you made one call somewhere.
• It may be you can turn some settings off to reach better standby specs but you say nothing of your usage specs - how much drain you have for 1hr internet browsing for instance. People who had issues couldn't make it past a few hours. The phone is rated for 6hrs 3G internet. A normal drain is then about 16-17% per hour. Calling would be 12-13%.

In summary, you can discuss with other users but I think you actually have no problem if you can hit the spec in terms of usage. It may just be with a little more config you can reduce your standby drain... you're at the fine tuning level, not at the problem level that sparked this thread.

Good luck.

Hi,

I have (over the last few weeks) tried all manner of turning things off on my iPhone 4S with the latest 5.0.1 iOS, and nothing worked.  Overnight my battery drain was consistenly over 50% with all apps closed!  (My previous iPhone 4 with iOS 5 only lost about 5-6% under the same conditions.)  In order to setup the 4S in the first place I had restored from my iPhone 4 iTunes backup.

Last night I tried an experiment - I backed up to iTunes, and erased all settings and content on my iPhone 4S.  After it re-started, I setup UK, no location services, wifi access, no Siri, and turned off some notifications that I didn't have running before I cleared the settings.  So it was a fresh restore, no apps, no music, no mail or exchange syncing.  (I had already turned Siri and Location services off before the clearing all settings and it made little difference to the overnight battery drain).

After charging to 100% before going to bed, I woke this morning to find the battery had only lost 5%! 

This is promising as it indicates it's not a hardware issue - it's either something to do with the restore, or some of the software on the iPhone.

My next steps are to try:

1. A full restore (just done) to restore everything - see if this second time around it is fixed

2. If that doesn't work, backup photos etc separately, then another erase of the iPhone, then just sync to iTunes to re-install all apps and setup everything else manually.

Here's hoping!

The software's definitely got massive bugs. Try this:

- disable push email

- set all email accounts to manual retrieval

- disable all notifcations for emails

- send yourself an email from your PC

Even with everything turned off relating to automatic retrieval of email, it still does it. Not good. Especially if that's a contributing factor to exceptionally poor battery life.

With twitter, i think it uses push notifications so it doesn't need to be running and actively poll on the phone. For instance , if i quit the mail app, i still will get mail notifications and can swipe the message and load mail. Apple Push Notifications servics maintain the connection to the phone and there are likely pings or connection checks  that occur for the service on an os level not an app level.  This minimizes the load so there arent a bunch of apps all runing and constantly checking.  The notification service , if it is contacted from twitter or another service with data, will check the settings you have registered to the with the apple push service and send the notification to your phone.  No matter what, there is a drain with notifications. M hunch is once one application is configured to receive notifications, connection checking occurs betwen the push service and the phone so it knows where it is on the network. If it is implemented correctly, these checks arent frequent if you are still and more frequent as you move. The other drain is for when the noification hits and is processsed.  If i get 9 emails over night, my screen just popped up for 20 seconds or so to process each message using battery.  I would even think that just go from low power to turning n the screen uses more juice than if the device was already on and i get the message.  On nights I get no notifications, I see a 3  or 4 percent drop.  On nights with a number of notifications, i have seen up to a 10 percent drop.  Besides notifications, wifi sync and icloud will poll on the local network and use up battery if the host computer is on and running itunes or trying to sync a data file that is corrupt (which i had with the apple movie trailers app causing my phone to drain).  For me turning off wifi sync and remving a corrupt file in icloud solved my battery issues and I get over 24 hrs of standby with 6 to 9 hrs of use and this is with all the normal location services and push serivices turned on. 

See http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ipad/#documentation/NetworkingInternet/Co nceptual/RemoteNotificationsPG/ApplePushService/ApplePushService.html for more info.  I think it has a good overview of how the notifications work.

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

The above was posted yesterday.

Today (11:55 GMT, UK Time) some 18 1/2 hrs later I have:

Current stats:  80% battery, Usage 1h 46 minutes Standby 22h 30 mins

This is with some location services on, namely: Camera, Maps, Safari, Siri

and with Compass Calibration and Traffic also on.

I had an app that had push notifications on overnight, so that presumably accounts for the 1h 46min usage figure - now turned off.

So in 18 1/2h of standby with no heavy useage of the phone other than the push notification from 1 app, the battery has dropped 17% - less than 1% per hour.

Oh, still using iOS 5 (steering clear of any updates for the moment) and Cellular Data is off (data over WiFi network).

Still (reasonably) happy.  Intending to do more research with usage to get a feel for my iBrick.

RB

EDIT: Just found "Auto Selection of Carrier" which was ON.  Now set to "OFF" - let's see if that makes any difference.

Hi xabbess,

First of all : thanx for sharing this info. All data regarding battery life is studied by me and points me in certain directions regarding possible workarounds.

If I would measure your data on my phone I would mark it with an entry in my battery drainage Numbers sheet as NOK. That means it is wrongly configured since the drainage is too fast.

A phone with a 'good' setup only looses about 8 percent in 14 hours when idling. I don't see this in your data.( Making 1 phone call doesn't change my opinion about it )

I am currently investigating battery drain issues when using WiFi and without WiFi ( so in my case 3G ), the battery drain levels seem to be different. That only makes sense since different circuitry is used in the phone. You could indicate if you were using the phone under Wifi or not, that would help me.

Regards.

I tried number 1 : didn't work.

I tried number 2 : that did work for me. But you lose all your app settings ( the location of your apps in your iPhone )  and email configurations which is a pain to reconfigure.

Nice to see you are doing the same things I did when I started with this endeavour.

Welcome to the club ;-)

Regards.

iCloud mail has its own push setting. There is a generic one for all other email accounts and a special one for iCloud.

I only found this out recently. I don't know why they did this in this particular way.

Regards.

Yep, I can't remember exactly where, but it's a slightly odd place for that setting.

But when that setting is off, and all other mail accounts either deleted or set to manual fetch, then to my mind it shouldn't be picking up mail. But it did.

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

Update:   as of Saturday, November 26, 2011 @ 23:03

Results:  39 hours of combined use since full charge. This included two hours of hotspot wireless coverage

Findings: ~2.53% battery drain/hour with usual daily use (with assumption that battery indicator calibrated and a precise measurement)

There's two more weeks of testing/reading posts before a final decision on whether or not I keep the Iphone 4s

My iPhone 4s 32gb battery life has become worse since the first day I got it about 2 weeks ago.

It is a replacement of my old problematic 4s 32gb.

First week I had over a day of standby and around 6-7 hours usage.

Now I'm getting 3 hours usage and 4 hours standby!!!

And all I am doing is browsing Internet on wifi with 3G data also on. Every other trick mentioned in these forums I have used.

Why is my battery life becoming worse?

We're in the same club: there's two weeks left to decide whether to keep the phone. Keep us posted on your findings.

does an iphone uses or discharges battery more rapidly without a sim card?

Well I have it insured so I'll just replace again. Annoying though, because I was expecting to recharge every other night, not every night!!!