Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I'm happy to report i did a full recharge and it seems to have helped a lot. Turned location services, blue tooth and wifi off.  Cellular data is on. Today I  left my phone alone (just responded to a few txts) and after 10 hrs of standby and 13 minutes of usage battery is still at 96% which seems about right for standby.  Going to test usage tomorrow

No.i didn't take any offense.but note that it has nothing to do with not being able to keep up with the evolving technology.but it has everything to do with being able to criticize something even though a lot of people love it.iphone has advantages but surely there are some things that you wouldn't benefit free of charge or without an internet connection(like the maps for ex.it really s.cks).if there were no open points then there wouldn't be any room for improvement,right?"open points" means that it can be criticized.and that's what we are doing here my friend.and...one more thing.i am an engineer,tracking technology is my job.but believe me,in our line of work,using twitter like apps is considered more like a time-passing rather than using an advanced technology.

I may have found a solution. My battery drain is down from 15% in 45 minutes to 1% in more than 45 minutes.

Here's what I did:

1. The issue started the day before yesterday after moving from MobileMe to iCloud. (Before that my 4S had the same battery reach as my iPhone 4.)
2. I noticed I had iDisk and Mobile Me Gallery apps on my iPhone. I thought, maybe there's a conflict between these and iCloud. But I couldn't remove them. I can't remove them on my iPhone because my apps only jiggle but no cross appears to remove apps. This is an issue I've had already on my iPhone 4. But now I also coudn't remove them via iTunes. I could uncheck them there, but syncing my iPhone didn't work anymore. Somehow I got the idea to remove as much files as I could and started with fotos. When all fotos were removed I was able to sync my iPhone again.
3. To be on the safe side I decided to wipe as much other stuff as possible. I deleted all videos, books, music, etc. and synced. Next I filled the now empty space with music to overwrite anything that might be sitting there in the shadow. Syncing. Then I disabled music syncing again so that all music filed got deleted from the iPhone. Now all that I had there were my apps and some data.
4. I restored my 4S to factory settings and then restored it from the backup, which only contained my apps data now.
5. Then I watched the battery. After 47 minutes it had not gone further down than 1%, from 100% to 99%. I had locations on, Wifi, iCloud (except notifications), mail as always set on fetch-every-30-minutes. Just Siri and mobile data were turned off. (But with exactly these settings I had the issue before, so there is an improvement of at least 15 times.)

I am now going to turn Siri back on, watch and then I'll turn on mobile data. I'll report my observations. But no matter the outcome, I managed to reduce the drain 15-fold, back to a level that was normal before (for my 4S and my 4).

P.S. To give you the full picture I have to add that apart from those two MobileMe apps I also removed some older apps that I hadn't used for a long time, most of them from times before iOS 4

Update: with Siri on just 1% drain in 45 minutes. I will now turn on mobile data again.

Update (before I go to sleep): now I have everything turned on: mobile data, Siri, iCloud, find my iPhone, ... and still I lost less than 1% in 33 minutes. My iPhone is back to normal. Maybe it would have been enough to remove those MobileMe related apps. Try it out. Goodnight

Last update: 1% drain in 45 minutes. Really back to normal!

Message was edited by: Pete from Switzerland

Did you see my latest post?

I think I found a solution: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3391947?start=8505&tstart=0

I removed iDisk and Mobile Me Gallery apps, and some other older ones, deleted the empty space on my iPhone by filling it with music and deleting that again and then I did a restore to factory, followed by a restore from backup. My 4S is back ton normal with less than 1% drain in more than 40 minutes. Everything is turned on (Wifi, mobile data, iCloud, etc.)

Between what percentages did this 1 percent drain in 33 minutes occur? I experienced the same thing between 100 percent and 99 percent, and also from 99 to 98, but after that it typically drops a percent every 3-5 minutes.

1AppleADayNoWay wrote:

 

... Apple has acknowledged the issue a long time ago...

Have they? I couldn't find acknowledgement of widespread issue from Apple since 5.0.2 anywhere. Just some fob-off about a small issue for a small number of users or other such PR-twaddle.

Craig Antonatos wrote:

 

I need some help.

 

I want Apple to answer.

 

This is ridiculous.

 

My local Apple store told me that there lead Genius doesn't have a clue! I don't know where to go.

Take it back to the Apple store, get a refund. Sorted.

Interesting.  I grew up in Dickinson.  I have visited that area many times, and have never seen bad signal strengths.  Maybe something in the building was shielding your phone. 

It is interesting to hear how people with battery problems seem to have set up their 4S much differently from mine.  I got a NEW SIM, even though I was changing from an iPhone 4 in use less than a month.  AT&T store said it wouldn't work well if I used the old SIM.  Maybe they need to tell OTHER places.  Then I went home and put the phone on iTunes as a 'new phone', then synced it. 

BTW, I don't think Siri will EVER be 100%.  Try telling it to add Hersey bars to your shopping list.  The results are somewhat interesting.  I also notice that it doesn't work well in my car, or with the TV going. 

I really like the phone, and have very few complaints with it.  I am still looking for a 'perfect' case though.

Now, would SOMEONE out there go to AT&T or Verizon, etc., and get a NEW SIM, and see if that helps the battery problem for them.  They will need to reset the phone completely, and then put in the new SIM, and then add it to iTunes as a new phone, and sync their data back, NOT restore.

Wouldn't it be fun to solve this problem before Apple?

I am experiencing the same problems! At first I thought the media was exageratting on this issue (like they did for the iPhone 4 "Antennagate" issue) but it's a real issue!

I have a white 16GB iPhone 4S I just got a few days ago brand new. Everytime I take it out to use it it's either about to die or dead. Meanwhile my iPhone 4 would still be at 40 or 50 percent.

I'm using two phones by the way, a black 16GB AT&T iPhone 4 and a white 16GB AT&T iPhone 4S. I can confirm the issue that the iPhone 4S has worse battery life than the iPhone 4, but I didn't expect it to be this bad.

It can't the the Apple A5 for sure because the iPad 2 upgraded from the Apple A4 to the A5 and didn't have the same issues.

My guess is that Siri is the culprit. The Raise to Speak function keeps the proximity sensor on all the time (I can see it in the dark).

Hmm...

It's possibly that could be the problem- I had raise to speak turned off, and when holding up the phone to the webcamera on my computer I could see the that the infrared sensor was completely on. So I turned raise to speak on and back off, but the sensor was still on. Then, I turned it back off, shut down the phone, turned the phone back on, and the sensor is no longer on. Now I'll be able to observe if it has an affect on the battery drain (although I have no way of knowing if it's been on all the time since I have restarted my phone many times in the past few days).

Hotphil wrote:

 

1AppleADayNoWay wrote:

 

... Apple has acknowledged the issue a long time ago...

Have they? I couldn't find acknowledgement of widespread issue from Apple since 5.0.2 anywhere. Just some fob-off about a small issue for a small number of users or other such PR-twaddle.

I meant 5.0.1 obviously

Only have my my 4S for 1 week now and the battery life is definitely not as advertised!! 

(568 pages on this thread was a bit much to read through...)

As this is my first iPhone, I'm still learning the ropes of how to "fiddle" with it... (bought an iPod Touch a while ago to start getting the feel for iOS).

Needless to say, my phone is still in basic "factory setting" mode - only downloaded a few game apps that was on the iPod Touch.  Backed up all my contacts from previous Nokia E90 via iSync then with iTunes to iPhone.  I don't use iCloud, eMail, Maps, Siri and Locations services (yet!!).  Also about 60 songs and 2 movies on it.

So how did Apple get to the advertised battery life??  Just added 10% to the iPhone 4 specs?

Doesn't this fall under false advertising - and AFAIK, an offense in South Africa...