The iPhone 4S battery runs down very quickly. Does anyone else have this problem?

You can fix this by deleting the Exchange account, rebooting, and adding it back. This closes "stale" connections that the phone attempts to maintain even though they are no longer exchanging information.

As a less drastic alternative, go into Settings/Mail,Contacts,Calendar, tap on the Exchange account, then turn off the 3 switches. Back out of Settings, then open Mail, then Contacts, then Calendar (to clear the queues), reboot, and turn the switches back on.

However, if you send or receive a lot of email (100 or more messages a day) Exchange accounts use more data than other email accounts, partly because all messages are HTML and are thus much larger.

When you put it back it must resync; you need to give it time to finish the resync before testing battery life. If the drain continues after a couple of hours there is a problem in the setup or in the Exchange server that is causing retries.

Exchange problems are not new to either the 4S or iOS 5; a search of the forum will find similar reports going back 4 years.

it's normal If you leave iTunes open and the iPhone/iPad in the same network, the iPhone WiFi card will not go to sleep when the iPhone is in "sleep" (because is hold "on" by iTunes WiFi sync) and this drain the battery.

Ingo2711 wrote:

Glad I could help to solve it 🙂

This seems to be the most common cause for the battery drain.

It is a common cause of battery drain, and has been for many phone models and many versions. Battery drain is a symptom, however, not the disease. It's a symptom that has many possible causes, almost all of them some app that is either sending data continuously or trying to. Exchange mail accounts are the worst offenders, but Ping, App Store, iTunes Store, Game Center, Facebook (and other social networking apps) can also cause excessive battery drain.

I got my 4S this past Saturday and have been doing a lot of tests with it. If you have Siri enabled, this is probably the culprit. There's a blog about this by someone else at: http://www.iphone4idiots.com/2011/10/siri-battery-drain-siri-iphone-4s-battery-l ife/

From what I can tell, with Siri enabled, and even not using my 4S, I still noticed very quick battery drain (much faster than on my iPod 3 at idle). I had "Raise to Speak" (RtS) enabled, as well. My guess is that the 4S, with RtS enabled, is constantly using the accelerometer to determine if you are raising your phone to your ear so that it can enable Siri. Also, continual use of Siri seems to also drain the battery as it sends not only what you say, but info from your phone (depending on your restriction settings) to Apple so that they can send the correct response to you (so good amount of CPU usage as well as network usage). All this adds to the battery drain.

You might also see some improved battery life upon changing your "Location" options. I think that the advertised idle time is for a iPhone with pretty much nothing enabled (no Siri, no Location, no Network, etc)

isnt this a new feature of Iphone 4s?

Disabling exchange with the three settings still caused the drain, and worse makes your contacts unavailable. Forcing the phone to resync again when you re-enable it.

Never had a battery drain issue like this with my Palm Pre that is configured the same way.

If the drain continues after turning off the 3 switches, opening the 3 apps, and rebooting then it isn't Exchange that is draining your battery.

It goes away when I delete the exchange account completely and reboot.

I noticed that in location services, under "system services" > "setting time zone" had the purple arrow indicating that it was updating, I checked 5, 10, 20 and 60 mins later, each time it was still purple. Have turned it off to see what the battery is like with it off.

Ok so I deleted iCloud rebooted my phone and then re-installed it. I also went into settings and then about and turned off the automatic diagnostic sending and it seems to have slowed the decline slightly. There still seems to be a problem bit I will post back later if it significantly helps. It stayed at 84% for over 6 minutes of standbys and me checking the battery.

Let me know if the iCloud delte and/or diagnostic auto send turn off helps anyone, apple isnt getting to the bottom of this so we all have too.

I had the same drain problem, but i don't have exchange email.

Here is what I did. I hope it helps:

I reset Siri, because I noticed the gps compass was on next to the battery icon. While the indicator was on, not only did my battery drain at a rapid pace, but it could not even fully charge. In fact, it got as high as 97% only to fall back to 95% while charging.

Resetting Siri got the location icon to go off. My battery still seems to be draining faster than on my 3GS but not nearly as bad as before.

Let's all remember that Siri is still in beta. These strange symptoms will all get addressed, and Siri will have more functionality. This is just the beginning of an evolutionary shift in the way we interact through our phones.

Meanwhile, let's keep sharing our battery-conserving tips and try to isolate various sources of the problem.

Unfortunately, for me (and no doubt others) the trick of removing Exchange accounts, rebooting, then re-adding doesn't work. I've tried it several times, even combined with a network settings reset. This issue, which seems to relate to Exchange, has existed since iOS 4.0.1 (i.e. not the original 4.0 release), but it comes and goes. I even started looking into it just over a year ago (see: http://www.sebyoung.co.uk/apple/iphone4_battery.shtml) but eventually gave up.

Since the last full charge, my phone has been on standby for 8.5 hours. Actual usage is no more than 15 minutes (6 minute call and 9 minutes just messing about), though iPhone is incorrectly reporting usage - another issue that has existed since iOS 4(.0.1). When I say incorrect, it might just be that iPhone is doing something that it shouldn't be in the background, but it's incorrect nevertheless.

My battery is down to 70%. Whilst not terrible, I believe it should be significantly better than this. I'm still convinced that Exchange is the issue.

A good iPhone app, is Battery Doctor (free app) from the iTunes, it shows Rapid Charge, Continuation and Trickle Charge, The one I downloaded was made by Beijing Kingsoft Internet. It has good tips for which things to switch off/on and also keeps count of full charges, normal charges and if overcharged, complete with a running countdown of how long left to reach the max charge (which is also accurate!).

Whilst it may not solve your immediate issue or be a total solution to the problem you are having, it does go a long way to help and is a great app to have and allows you to monitor the battery!

GPS is constantly on and polling your location if you have a location-based reminder active.