Q: iPhone 4s Battery Life?

I too have had enough.So mine is being returned on Wednesday.I'm going over to Android until the iPhone 5 is released.Between now and then I'll get an iPod touch.

Sorry Apple but this ones a Stinker.

In the hope that this will prompt some sort of "to the point" answer from Apple I'm adding my bit.

I have never owned a smartphone of any sort before this iPhone 4S. Nothing to transfer over from another phone or anything.... just a fresh account on a fresh phone. Overnight, with my phone not being used, I lose about 30% of my battery's charge. That's doing nothing. Just click the button on top to put the fully charged phone to sleep, wake up in the morning, click the button on top... 70% charge remaining.

Your specs say standby should last 200 hours but at this rate my phone will be drained, while in standby mode, in about 1/10 that time.

This can't be normal, can it? I have no reference for how a phone should use battery power but with my Macbook, this same treatment will leave me with almost 100% power in the morning. Both devices are using wifi.

Do I turn off notifications? Is there an app accessing something even while the phone is asleep? Is there some sort of crash/reboot cycle going on? Is location services constantly running? Some sort of reminder setting? Syncing? Conecting with iCloud? How do you even know where to being troubleshooting this?

Come on Apple... this is not acceptable.

It depends a lot on what you were doing and how you were connecting, but it looks in the right range. iPod uses very little; YouTub uses a lot, the camera uses a huge amount. Web browsing over 3G uses more than over WiFi, but you didn't say which. So here is my analysis:

7 1/2 standby accounts for about 4%

2:50, assuming all Internet on 3G, would use about 47%

Leaving out the iPod you should have used around 51%, and you only used 47%. If you were web browsing using WiFi instead that would have only used 31% for a total of 35%. So if it was WiFi all the way you used a little more than the specs, but remember I didn't include YouTube, the camera or iPod.

Based on these specs:

• Talk time: Up to 8 hours on 3G, up to 14 hours on 2G (GSM)
• Standby time: Up to 200 hours
• Internet use: Up to 6 hours on 3G, up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi
• Video playback: Up to 10 hours
• Audio playback: Up to 40 hours

mac2112 wrote:

 

I'd like to ask the same question

 

Black 32 Gig 4s, restored from back up

 

Usage: 1 hr 37 mins

Standby: 9 hrs 6 mins

 

current 70%

 

haven't done any really heavy usage, and only 1 call for 10 mins

What were you doing for the 1 hr 37 minutes? If you weren't using it you have an app that is using data in background. But that 1:37 would account for 27%, and 9 hours standby would use about 4%. A 10 minute call is about 2%. So 70% is close where you should expect to be for those numbers (actually, it's a little better than you should expect).

But rather than obsess over numbers ask yourself if the phone meets your needs. For me it does, because I charge it overnight every night, and I have some energy left when I go to bed after a normal day's usage. On rare occasion I use it very heavily during the day (a few times a year) and I have to charge it in the late afternoon. I carry a backup battery for that purpose. This, of course, was for my older iPhone Classic and then a 3GS, but the 4S battery life is better than either of those for me.

Wigan Warriors RL wrote:

 

I too have had enough.So mine is being returned on Wednesday.I'm going over to Android until the iPhone 5 is released.Between now and then I'll get an iPod touch.

Sorry Apple but this ones a Stinker.

I'm sure you will love the battery life of the Android. Although most people with Androids really complain a lot about battery life.

Prior to ios 5 my iphone 4 lasted 2+ days on 1 charge. After upgrade, my phone was drained in a few hours. After recharging to 100%, battery drained in less than 7 hours. I've turned off everything with iCloud, have added no new apps, but battery still drains to less than 10% in 12 hours or less.

This is making my iPhone an impractical device and has already caused me to miss some important calls.

APPLE, PLEASE FIX THE PROBLEM!

im still in two mind whether to do this wigan warrior. cause i dont know if orange will get the Prime. i left o2 recently to join orange and may end up going back again cause orange might not be getting the prime... bad times

i too would also get an ipod i love playing on the apps and stuff and they are really actually quite good value for money

So I visited the genius bar and the guy there seemed knowledgeable on the issue.

He told me that the act of restoring from a backup might have something to do with it and that I should just erase and start over without using the restore feature.  He also did some diagnostics on my unit and looked up what was being reported to Apple and noticed by Standby and Usage times were identical.  He thought erasing and starting over without restoring would fix that and that was most likely my problem.

Made sense.

I did that, it takes a lot of work re-organizing apps - but it is also a time to purge apps you really don't need.

So, I did this and it looks like my battery is still going fast, both standby and usage are indentical.

I am pretty much addicted to charging the iPhone 4S, so this isn't much of a problem for me right now, but on some upcoming business trips and/or vacations, I am VERY concerned.

well there has to be something wrong i know ppl with androids and they havent complained.... oh and they can change there battery easily they dont have to replace the handset....

i know for afact my iphone isnt as advertised..

i made a 10minute call, i lost 4% battery

if 4% = 10mins then 4x6 = 24%/h

so therefore in just over for hours my battery would have hit zero. that i believe is 3 times lower performance than what is stated.

Though I'd update on my battery life today since my "fix" earlier. The phone has been on standby for 15 hours, has had 3.5 hours usage, and is now on 69% charge which is in my opinion perfectly adequate for a powerful phone like the 4S. Everything is turned on (wifi, 3G, iCloud, location services, etc) except for the auto time zone setting. My girlfriend's iPhone 4 running iOS 5 was also eating battery life and is also now working perfectly again since she turned the time zone setting off as well.

So the problem, at least for me, was auto time zone constantly using GPS and perhaps a corrupted contact in my contact list that was causing a crash loop while syncing with iCloud.

Give it a go.

I see your point.  I mainly used it over the 3G (AT&T) data network.  The utube videos where 7 minutes each, browsing and playing I would say 17 to 20 minutes.  All my web usage is over 3G. On good days I mighty get a bit over six hours (6:15 one day) and since my last iPhone 4 was giving me close to seven hour of usage doing pretty much the same things, I had to ask.  I do understand that usage and many other factors will compromise battery performance, and in addition until we have a better way to improve battery on gadgets, charging over night might be the best solution for now.  Funny enough or sarcastic, I think then phone pretty much cover my needs (but I had to complaint, go figure). 

Anyhow, I was supposed to go to the apple store for a supposed replacement, but I first would like to know peoples true experience on daily use.  Many posts are about poor battery, but many users do not post his or hers usage, and only say terrible battery performance.  Although, I do understand their might be some people having very poor battery performance.  Anyhow, number comparison is what worked for me.

Thanks for your input.

M

Something for people to try:

Turn off the Notification Center for your Calendar.  Not an ideal solution, but has helped me dramatically since doing so and is something I'd happily sacrifice for a few weeks until Apple has a fix.

I found this using the System Status app which monitors various things on your phone (like CPU usage).  I noticed that when my battery life was shrinking most quickly, the CPU on my iPhone was at around 70%+ and my phone was heating up.  Meanwhile, in my logs, I noticed that there were some messages about a possible leak with labels like "_caldatabasechangednotification"  that would literally happen every minute and the phone said it had tried to "registered 20 times" or something like that (I don't have the exact message anymore).  There were a few other long labels but all seemed to be related to the Calendar and Calendar notifications. 

Anyway, literally as soon as I turned off the Notification Center in my calendar (I turned off "Badge App Icon" and "View in Lock Screen" for good measure, but left on Alerts), my CPU went down to more normal below levels (below 10% and most of the time much lower).

So far, I've lost only about 12% of my battery life in the last 4-5 hours.  In the previous 4-5 hours I had lost about 70%.

Mine's really inconsistent which is making it very hard to assess what might be causing the battery life issue.

Last night I charged it fully and left it overnight with no apps running - it died within 7 hours.

This evening it's still on 40% after 14 hours with moderate use throughout the day.

Wierd.

I have tried something today which does seem to have made a difference!!  I was using battery doctor when I charged my phone overnight, and in the morning it was at 100% on the battery doctor but the percentage almost immediately after taking it off charge dropped to 98.  Before I went out this morning I stuck the phone back on charge and I noticed the percentage on battery doctor was completely different to the actual phone!  Checked this a couple of times and the numbers were always different.

Anyway, I downloaded Battery Magic from the App store, there is a free version and one for 69p, which is the full version. It charged properly to 100% and have had good battery life the rest of the day, its now 11:15 and its at 38%.  I have read lots of emails on it, played a few games and a few calls.  Not getting too excited, will charge it to full overnight again and see what happens after a morning of calls - but you never know ....

Same problem here. Cannot keep a day (10 hours) without recharging, with no application in the background and no SIRI. Apple, we have a problem!