iPhone 4S Battery Life

Here is a suggestion from someone that I read in another discussion. Ask for a generator for Christmas, otherwise we got wait and see if Apple magically updates this iOS 5 to fix battery issues, it seams that every major iOS bring this same problem...

Try:

Settings -> General -> About -> Diagnostics & Usage

choose "Don't send"

The automatic sending of the D&U data has been another thing that seems to be draining people battery faster than usual (some people have reported that it is sending a lot of data, and doing it quite frequently).

Turn off the Siri Raise to Speak option. It fixed the battery drainage for me. I think leaving it on drains the battery by leaving the proximity sensors on. Give it a shot it worked.

Iphone 4 Steve - New last Saturday. Amazing phone love the highly accurate dictation features, speed everything. EXCEPT the battery!!!

If you want all the new features dont take it on a trek of more than 3-4 Hrs!

Followed all the advice, restored as new phone, now running with only the standard Apps, location services, iCloud, Siri raise to speak all off. Brightness set to around 20%. Deleted email account and reset. Yes there is a slight improvement but nowhere near the claimed let alone +50% improvement expectations.

Battery drains as follows (after tweaking the thing down to a pretty much brick basic phone, less functions than a 3G);

1 min call - 1%

3 min video - 3 %

10 min standby - 1%

Couple of texts 1%

Overnight drain 10% - 20%!

So learn to love your charger and cable and piggy back batt pack and... hang on.....!

On the other hand iPhone 3G? Great battery life with locations, wifi loads of apps, 16Gb of stuff.. all tunred on.

iPad 1 ? - amazing battery, watch a video for 3 mins battery doesnt budge off 100%! You sure can do it Apple so come on guys..!

Great phone, shame about the Battery, Apple please help us! Any useful response from Apple gratefully received. So are we stuck with this, is it a hardware limitation? i.e.

Is the battery too small to cope with the faster processor and the great new features? I gather the battery is pretty much the same size as the iPhone 4. Can we get a replacement high power batery Apple or can you do a software fix?

Need to know please Apple, this is an expensive top of the range phone with faithful users guys.

Joninj89,

Jokes a part, I calibrated my iPhone 4S twice since day one (10/14) and it is performing much better, my last usage was 6:11 web over 3G an standby 1day and 3 hours. I recommend doing that, unless your phone is give out within two hours, I string believe calibrating it helps quite bit.

Thats my two cents...

thanks for tips re calibrating - but what is that ? I did a restore of the ios 5, but still no improvement. I've turned off many things, but still very bad battery life..... SOOOOOOO disappointed with this phone. I'm tempted to go back to the iphone 4 which had great battery life even with everything ON !!! Can you tell me how to CALIBRATE that you refer to........ ANYBODY ????

maryfrom the hills wrote:

thanks for tips re calibrating - but what is that ? I did a restore of the ios 5, but still no improvement. I've turned off many things, but still very bad battery life..... SOOOOOOO disappointed with this phone. I'm tempted to go back to the iphone 4 which had great battery life even with everything ON !!! Can you tell me how to CALIBRATE that you refer to........ ANYBODY ????

The calibration does not improve the battery life, it calibrates the accuracy reading of your battery. To do this, fully charge it first to 100% once fully charge let it run down to 0% until your phone shuts it self off. Once it shut it self off, your phone is drained completely, hold the power button to see if the phone will turn on or not. If it does not then it's completely drained. Then plug it in and charge it to 100%. This is the recalibration process.

I did a full restore (did NOT restore from backup, set up as new phone), and my battery issue is gone. I was getting maybe 12 hrs with little to no use to more than a day and a half with light to moderate use. Since doing the restore I'm getting better battery performance than I had with my iPhone 4. It's a pain, but very worth it if solves the problem.

G

Here is my result from my visit to the Apple store that I posted on another discussion:

Visited the Apple store last night. The gentleman that helped me out did a Apple Sotwear check on my iPhone and founded out that my battery shows no know issues. Interestily, the diagnostic showed that I had 8:10 minutes of usage and 1 day and 17 hours of standby; however, my phone showed that it had been used for 4:37 minutes and standby was 1 day and 17 hours, very strange result (I wonder if the iOS is NOT showing usage as it should). He also told me that no one needs to worry about calibrating the battery, I DONOT beilve on this, as Apple recommends on its website. As far I'm concern, batteries need to be calibrate, but I'm open to learn otherwise. Anyhow, the diagnostic also showed that MOBILEME and PayPal apps were quitting unexpected. I did notice PayPal quitting, but not MobileMe; however, I cannot get emails or notifications via push, I need to go into the mail app and refresh it in order to receive messages.

Anyways, he said the samething already posted on this discussion, turn off locations and things that's is not necessary. Also, the technician suggested that it might be a glitchy in this new iOS; however, he was blaming apps for it, when on my case only one developer app showed problem, PayPal (which I deleted) and Apple's MobileMe.

Currently, my usage is 6:11 hours and standby 1 day and 19 hours (6% left on this usage). Much better then my first usage. Apparently, the battery can improve overtime. And if Apple fix this "glitch" we will experience much better results with this new iPhone and iOS.

Hope it helps.

I'm currently trying "Cellular Data:Off, WiFi:Off" to see if this is the true standby. Looking positive -

I Made a quick call to be certain phone still worked, then screen off/lock for an hour - still 100%

screen off/lock for 2nd hour - 99%

screen off/lock for 3rd hour - 98%

(predicts only 100hrs standby)

Compared with 16 usage 32 standby - 9% with only turning WiFi off when not using it.

(Both have location:off, no apps running, bluetooth:off, icloud:off, Siri:off)

I think all of the things mentioned here will result in incremental battery life gains.

That said, I have some anecdotal evidence suggesting a larger culprit of battery drain.

I am a student and a stay at home dad and I have noticed that, while I am at home with all settings the same as when I am at school, my battery life is significantly better.

An example of this is when I went to bed last night I was charged to 68%... When I woke up my battery was at 65%.

This morning, when I left for school at 7:00 and used my phone for about 10 minutes up until 9:30, I went down to 51%.

The only thing different between home and school is I have access to wifi at home and not at school...

I have several thoughts about this. Perhaps the wifi is always hunting while I am at school - resulting in a significant battery drain. Maybe the location services are the culprit because the lack of wifi is affecting the performance of the location services. Lastly, it could be a combination of both.

What I plan to try is turning, my wifi off altogether at school and see how my battery performance is then. If it is significantly better, I could possibly conclude it isn't location services issue but a wifi issue. Otherwise, there maybe an issue with the location services and/or wifi (perhaps in combination) contributing to the battery drain.

Obviously, a lot of this is anecdotal, but what does everybody else think?

I have done some further tweaking to improve my battery life including: 1. Doing a restore as some have suggested. 2. Going through my notifications and location services and turning off as much as possible. 3. Calibrating my battery.

Now, as I mentioned before I am very much a home-body and I have some very interesting observations... When I went to calibrate my battery, I spent from about 7 to 12pm surfing the web, playing Real Racing and watching Netflix, but I was unable to kill my battery before bed... I wanted to do this because I wanted it to be charged this morning when I woke up - like I normally do.

So at home, where I have a steady wifi connection, I experienced fantastic battery life and was unable to easily drain the battery.

Today, after I had done all of these things to improve my battery life, I took a 6 mile trip across town. In three miles, I lost 4% battery life listening to music. Now, I doubt that it was just the music because normally I can play several minutes of games or surf the web for a few minutes without my battery coming off the 100% mark.

The kicker here too is that I had a message pop up asking me to connect to a local wifi... I went into the Settings and turned off "ASK TO JOIN NETWORKS" under Wi-Fi and I was able to make the remainder of the trip on only an additional 1% battery life.

Now this isn't an observation under perfectly controlled circumstances but I have a hypothesis...

I think that when our phones with iOS 5 don't have a steady wifi connection, that the battery is draining for us because of this "ASK TO JOIN NETWORKS".

In fact, from the observations I have made and the steps I have taken to improve my battery life, I would say that this has been the NUMBER 1 culprit of bad battery life for me.

Is "ASK TO JOIN NETWORKS" having a seemingly similar result on anybody elses battery life?

After reading this post and my previous is anybody able to add an credence to the observations that I have made?

Does anybody have any observations about what I have said.

There is a lot of confusion on these boards and my hope is that people will work together to investigate different culprits to help mitigate the issues with bad battery life.

I'm at 67% after 3 hours, 5 minutes of usage and Standby time at 7 hours, 43 minutes. I turned off Siri Raist to Speak. Fixed my problem.

This solved my battery drain issue hands down. Go to Settings, General, Reset and select Reset network Settings. Heavy battery drain now a thing of the past. Found this fix using Google... Good luck.

Hi, I'm having the same problem with poor battery life. I have an iphone 4s, my first iphone, previously a blackberry user. Love the phone, but have been following all the tips like turning off notification services, turning off notifications and changing to fetch data when I'm not at work (I have my corp email on it). My battery drains about 4.5% an hour. I'll try some of the additional tips on this board, particularly the "reset network settings" above. Incidently, Siri doesn't seem to make a difference on mine, but again, I have location services turned off.