Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

SHADYZZ wrote:

 

[...] that NOBODY can fix it except Apple, and having to turn one's phone into a useless brick is NOT a fix, and that we'd still be here until Apple releases a fix... I was called names and attacked for that too.

 

And here we still sit. But watch, those useless scrubs who attacked me then will attack me again. Way too funny!

Poor you, they called you names. Grade school must have been really hard for you, when you use to brag about your IIGS and the tough guy in the schoolyard showed you that System7 wouldn't shield you from getting it in the face. But now that you're in a position to discard people's opinions based on your management status - instead of sound logic and openness - what has changed? Nothing much. But as it's Xmas time I have some compassion.

There is such a middle ground between Apple fixing all the issues and users turning their phones into a brick. It's about education and better practices, deduction and so many other things you still haven't understood. It was never about fixing what Apple should fix. It was about autonomy and doing the best you can with what's at hand. And venting and all. Those people haven't been sitting like you, condescendingly telling them how to live and how to act. They've tried, and in so many cases have succeeded at getting some more value for what they paid for, without getting any official support in here. That you couldn't see this speaks of itself of what you stand for. But it's nice to see you've somewhat let go of the "have a nice beverage and enjoy life" attitude. So there was a benefit, even for you!

So take care!

Regarding this battery drainage issue, there are only 2 things I know for sure.  First, no one on this forum (or any consumer) really knows what the true root causes are for extraordinary battery drain.  Second , we really have no idea how widespread this problem is.   Much of what is published here is speculation, theories and frustration and everyone should keep that in perspective as they read the postings.   With that being said, I will continue to share my thoughts as I find the time.

At this point, the battery usage on my AT&T 32GB 4S seems to be in a reasonable range so I am probably going to stop my testing/monitoring of my battery.  When I first set up my phone, I was losing 20% per night in stand-by and 3% to 8% per hour during the day in standy-by.  A screen shot of my last charge cycle is posted below.  My current settings are WiFi On, Bluetooth On, All Location Services On, Siri On and All Notifications On. 

The settings that I have turned off but am not sure how much they really impact things are:

• No iCloud
• No Siri Raise to Speak
• No Time Zone Update under system services
• No Notification Center
• No WiFi Sync

The settings that I have turned off that I believe have helped are:

• Emails are set to manual fetch.  This was a significant battery drain reduction and as others have noted, I believe this is related to my MS Exchange account. Even with fetch hourly, my phone was was losing 3% ot 7% per hour in stand-by.  Only manual fetch has had an impact.
• Reminders are turned off on my email accounts.  My Yahoo account was automatically creating some weird reminder lists.  I still use reminders but they are not tied to my email accounts.

The other thing I am doing is looking for signs of rogue processes that are increasing battery usage.  I still see periodic increases in battery usage and believe this is related to O/S bugs and runaway apps (apps that continue to run even after they are closed down).  I have a couple of apps that monitor CPU usage, RAM usage and open background processes.  If my battery drainage increases after I've closed everything and I see high CPU/RAM activity, I will do one of the following:  Shut off the phone, hard reset or soft reset.  I think these activities as well as battery drains to zero are different ways of killing uncontrolled processes.  One of my traffic apps will continue to use the GPS even after I close out the app.  Even turning off the phone does not shut it down.  Only a hard reset will kill that particular process. 

FWIW, I do not believe the battery drains to zero really help other than kill processes and possibly reset parts of the phone.  If you understand Lithium based battery technology there is only a small benefit to doing this.   Apple states that all of their devices with sealed batteries are pre-calibrated and they do not publish any procedures for recalibrating the battery for iphones, ipads or Macbook Airs.  Lithium based batteries are designed to be recharged any time and in any fashion.  In my last charge cycle below, I started charging the phone in my office on my laptop, continued to the charge in my car and finished the charge cycle on a block at home.  I do this all the time and this has had no apparent effect on my battery life. 

Here is how my phone usage was for the past 2 days wiht the above settings.  My usage was relatively light during this period:  3 hours music, 20 minutes phone calls, 1 hour for email and web browsing.  This may not be as good as others but I can live with it.

Here is my current cycle:

Good luck to everyone.

This is only my third post here but after turning location off it seems to hold a charge better.

I too was losing 10% per hour on standby and between 15-25% per hour when I was using the phone.  I went into the apple store today and the reset my phone to factory default settings and wiped everything out.  I then setup the phone as a new phone, NO RESTORE.  Then I had my brother monitor with his Iphone 4 which has good battery life. Just to lay the foundation down for his Iphone 4.  He had his phone on for 11 hours and still had 65% remaining the day before.  So, with both of us running side by side first on wifi with just push email and text messaging running in the background and with text messages in and out we both dropped just 3% in the hour.  Then switched to 3G and the same 3% lost for the hour.  This was with light useage as a phonecall was received by each of us and we both dowloaded an app each just to see how it would react.

So, bottom line is it may be something to do with the restore of previous iphone config that is not agreeing with current Iphone 4s.  I will post again tomorrow with my useage if anything changes.

But as you can see my problems seem to have gone away with setting up as a new phone

I don't know if it is hardware or software. Maybe it's both. My experience has been terrible. After the hard reset nothing has changed. The battery drains like it's being sucked by a vampire.  Very light use, almost everything turned off, but still it doean 't make to the end of the day!

I tried deleting my mail exchange acct and left the rest to manually get my emails. It helped I think.. Will keep you guys posted..

Ed-bot888

You dont have to remove microsoft exchange, you just need to tunr push off.

i agree fully

and i have been to many parts of the net just out of curiosity

to see what others found

as i will say my inital charge out the box

i used to add all the apps i need

google and earth

camera apps and some music etc 2gb

i feel its also worth adding whats in the memory

i am using 2.6GB so 2GB  of mp3 and 600mb of apps

so ... this is my usage stats {i wont take photos as i feel its a waist of time

anyway

75% left 1hr 34 mins usage 1day 4hrs stndby

the only tweeks i have done is a soft reset after i read a bit as at first my bat was also draining quite fast

out the box so i expect to cycle the cell before it became more stable anyway!!! this is normal

of any product i have with li ion cells

turn off wifi and 3g when i dont need it

the siri thing that cant understand my scots accent anyway so is useless

and bluetooth

push i didnt play with as i disabled the network use

if you dont need it then and there TURN IT OFF

or you should expect hungry horise at your bat

i feel 75% left to go and stats as is , is fine !!!

playing games i would defo stick a cable or bat back on !!!

as i asume 3d will burn a few Watts per min atleast!!!

i also enabled auto lock and a pin

and if i put my phone down i always click the power button to suspend it

dont wait for the time to expire to shut it off

if you dont use it

power it down to standby i have moved the brightness to 80% for the duration of this test charge...

why wait for the mpus to expire a min when you just click the power button

and the drain stops

easy stuff really

so.. if you cant restore the phone to a usable state

in that your getting more than 3days

then i feel there is an issue with the phone

and you should defo seek some more help from an apple store

or your phone providers solution !!

i do like the posts about the network ic setup being a problem as i agree it could be the main issue

moving the iphone to network off cured any drain issues i had

if i want 3g its becouse i want email

why treat a phone like a laptop ....???

email takes seconds to get  and send at anytime

and seems 3g isnt as harsh of charge level as wifi is

the battery is prob i havent checked ~ 1.1 amps per hour

so this is 1.1amps for 1 hr or 110amps for 1 second {lol:)}

so.. i think it will be ~ 3.8v cell @ 1.1amph

working this out it uses a 5v charger....

so IV=watts

so 1.1*3.8 = 4.18 watt hours

so the phone would have to run using say 5watts and it would last 3.8hrs

so a phone that uses 5watt hours??  not hard with all the bells and whistels turns on full blast

the average 5v ic uses ~ 50ma current

i assume the iphone will have an ic count of ~ 20

so given 3.3v chipsets these days using standby pins and quesant current of about 2ma each or less

so 2maX20ic's = 40ma per hour or less

so 1.1amph /40ma

1.100/0.040 = 27.5 hrs

as you see doing some guess maths

the iphone4s seems better than others .. and quite optimised !!!

i would be greatfull of input on the maths side

but as you see at full whack youll get ~ 30hr of uptime if you fully charge it and dont let it standby

standby i recond most of the chipset will shut down to like micro amps use

with small peeks where the chipset will run processes

i feel as other point out who make phone stuff

is where the current gets gobbled up

http://www.leonaudio.com.au/pwheel.pdf

handy chart

Hi to all,

I've updated my 4S to iOS 5.0.1 Build 9A406

Seems that has fixed my battery problem finally.

I Charged it on Saturday, and it went empty on Monday afternoon.

Some facts:
before the update, the usage and standby time in the settings were nearly the same... I think all of u know that strange one...   8hrs usage 9hrs standby, without using it...anyway...

after the update to build 9A406 , here some facts from monday:
1% battery left,

9hrs Usage

1d13hrs Standby

^^ after the first battery charge.... 
hope it keeps on improving

Before u ask:  I did no settings change from 9A405 to 9A406... nothing... so... there had to be something in 9A405 which causes the battery life problem issue....

Hope i could help some of u.
Try updating to 9A406 and reply to my post if this fixes ur battery problme as well.

Greetings

what are your settings? what do you have ON and what do you have OFF?

the new 5.0.1 9A406 has fixed the battery for me aswell. using a 3g connection still seems to suck a lot of power, maybe due to the static noise issue, but standby and wifi and everything else is really fine now.

before the update i could only get about 18 h standby and minimal usage with a lot of phantom usage, max.

after the update i had 4h of light usage with 2d2h standby.

i just plugged the phone into the charger now with 1%, 6h 5min usage and 2d 6h standby. i can really live with that.

wifi, 3g, icloud, photostream all on, display brightness at about 50%, location services off, bluetooth off.

maybe the static noise CAN by fixed by software, i hope so at least, but even if not, the phone is definately usable now.

My iphone averaged 3% discharge on standby on wifi in the days after buying it.  Sometimes the battery would discharge by larger amounts e.g. 9% in an hour seemingly without explanation.

I thought turning off exchange push (and set time zone,and doing a reset) improved my battery life. Initially to 0.625% per hour on standby, but then later it seemed to go back to 2-4%, with again some bigger unexplained drops.

But since then my battery life felt like it's just got better and better. 

So I turned exchange push ON again, and in the next four hours standby discharge was still only 0.5% per hour on wifi.  I then switched off wifi to use 3G and over the next 8 hours averaged 1.1% per hour standby discharge.

This is the real-world usage I get now with exchange push on.

I am very happy with this usage compared to my HTC which wouldn't last four hours of real-world usage.

Obviously my situation is different to those who lose 30% every hour, but I still wonder what was different about my phone in the period after the reset compared to now.

There are two explanations I can think of:

1) To begin with I suffered from some rogue battery draining process and for whatever reason it has stopped, or is intermittent and coincidentally has been rarer in the last week.

2) When I set up Exchange email again after a reset and turning off set time zone, I set it to download 1 month of emails. This was for 1 folder.  I assumed iOS would go all out to download this straight away but thinking how the iOS works: what if this operates as a background process slowly over days?  This would explain the "unexplained" discharges that I initially experienced, and would be especially draining over 3G.

I think number two is a plausible explanation. 

I am going to turn exchange back to 15 min fetch and see what effect that has.

Hi I upgraded my 4S to 5.0.1 ( 9A406 ) and battery has improved a lot and alos i was having some other issues like signal which alos got gixed with this upgrade.

Ok - I will try the backup over itunes or iCloud when I get back home; I am traveling for a few weeks at this time. Thanks again for the great advice!