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iPhone 4S Poor Battery Performance SOLVED!!

iPhone 4S Poor Battery Performance SOLVED!!


I found the issue with the iPhone 4S battery performance.


I bought 2 iPhone 4S models on the first day. One for my wife and one for me. The strange thing was that mine would kill the battery in 4-6 hours and ran VERY WARM to the touch. My wife's phone worked great. It was cold to the touch. She would forget to charge it at night... and the battery performance was great... even better than our prior 3GS models.


What was the difference? I have my phone connected to Exchange for my corporate email. But exchange is not exactly the problem. The issue is in Notification Center. For some reason, I had hundreds of calendar reminders that kept refreshing on notification center. Furthermore, the reminders would flicker between the time remaining and the start time for the event at such a fast rate that it could not be read... (clearly a bug)


What is the solution? Go to Settings>Notifications>Calendar and disable Notification Center. You can still have the "alert style" set to Banners, or Alerts and you will still receive notices about your events, but it will not BUILD a summary in the Notification Center drop down screen. This is where the BUG exists. [Oddly, this does not affect my iPad 2, but is an issue for iOS 5 on the iPhone (different builds, maybe?)]


So, it appears that Notification Center has an endless loop in collecting the calendar events from Exchange and this is burning up our 4S batteries. Once you stop the madness from Notification Center, your iPhone 4S will perform as advertised.


Enjoy!

Tim

iPhone 4S, iOS 5

Posted on Oct 28, 2011 10:05 AM

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Posted on Oct 28, 2011 10:08 AM

I'm trying this immediately as I see the same crazy flickering with events. Thanks for the tip. Hopefully this helps.

61 replies

Oct 29, 2011 2:21 PM in response to William Rivas

I am having the same problem. I know when I installed exchnage for my phone on the 4 it drained the battery a little quicker than normal. But now I can't get passed 4 - 5 hrs before the phone has to be rechared... It's drinving me crazy and really might want to ask Apple to take back the phone. It's unfortunate as I've had an iPhone since they releasee their first one. Apple please figure out the problem soon!!!!!!!!

Oct 29, 2011 9:27 PM in response to jonspad

Here is my question...does turning off Location Services also automatically turn off Location Services for the "System Services" that use it? Perhaps someone more knowledgable than me can confirm.


i.e. Navigate to Settings>Location Services>System Services (bottom of the page); note what is listed:


Cell Network Search

Compass Calibration

Diagnostics and Usage

Location based IAds

Setting Time Zone

Traffic


I have a IPhone 3GS with IOS 5.


Needless to say, minimizing, or at least intelligently managing your use of screen brightness, wifi and GPS on any smartphone will maximize battery life.

Oct 31, 2011 4:24 AM in response to TimothyW

This fix works for me too.

After upgrade my iPhone 4 to iOS 5 the stanby time reduced down to 16 hours in very light use. I tried all fixes found in these discussions: restore, set as a new phone, disable geo-fencing and so on. No succes at all. But after swithcing off calendar in notification center my iPhone has been working 20+ hours in normal use (calls, e-mails, twitter, RSS, music) and I still have about 30% of charge. Much better!

Thanx TimothyWfor advice.

Oct 31, 2011 10:48 PM in response to TimothyW

I upgraded to iOS5 on my iPhone 4 (not 4s). I had the same battery drain problems after upgrade. I followed the advice in the original post and disabled Calendar notifications only. This positively stopped the battery drain.


There may be a confluence of situations causing the battery drain. But mine did get solved. So take it as another datapoint. It may not be the fix for everyone.

Nov 1, 2011 3:47 PM in response to TimothyW

Another one with extremely poor battery life.


Having spoken to Apple today, they advised me to turn off all location services, WiFi and bluetooth, great fix there !!


Having charged it to 100% for the second time today, it has dropped 7% in less than 2 hrs by just sitting there. When checking its useage stats, it reports it has been used for 40minutes ?


How does the useage stats work, surely USE is the amount of time the phone is being used when out of standby ? I can't see how it comes to the conclusion it has been used for 40 minutes when it has been just sitting onmy desk having been taken off of charge and not used at all with all apps closed and no location services running.


This is really driving me mad as I feel affraid to use my phone as i cannot predict its battery drain.

My wife now has my iPhone 4 also running iOS 5, with the phone not being charged for 2 days it is still at 60%, my iPhone 4S was down to 40% after 6hrs !

Nov 1, 2011 5:10 PM in response to TimothyW

I was having the exact same problem. My iphone 4s would get very hot and my battery would drain away. I would check my notifications in the notifcations center and notice that my calendar appointments would blink continuously like they were getting refreshed every 2 ms. That can't be good for my battery. I turned off the calendar items in notification center and since then phone has been staying cool and battery isn't nose diving.


Thanks,


Jim

Nov 2, 2011 2:37 AM in response to TimothyW

You all might have some apps that run in the background which in turn will drain the battery. Double click your home button then press and hold one of the apps until you get a red (-) symbol on the app. Just click all of those to close them down and that should help with the battery lasting longer. Other things to try is turn down the brightness of your screen and certain apps will drain the battery as well.

Nov 3, 2011 6:50 AM in response to TimothyW

Adding my experience to the thread. I reset/restored my phone as a new device twice last night. The first time, the battery was still draining horribly even with turning off a lot of items. The second time I turned off all notifications, mainly because I use Exchange and read a lot of information on this board and elsewhere about a glitch between notification and Exchange that periodically creates a looping. That certainly made sense as to why my battery would run down. I also removed my Facebook app as I read that people who updated that app after loading IOS 5 were noting low battery life. Hopefully that app developer will get this situation fixed (lots of glitching with that app and IOS 5). After the second restore as new and turning off all the notifications, my battery is lasting just like it used to. I went to bed with it readying 99% and woke up with 97% even with Exchange "pushing" all night. I admit, I'm not happy about having to turn off the notifications, but I'm happy to have my battery acting appropriately now. Hopefully Apple gets a fix pushed out soon. These notes may not help everyone, but I did want to share my experience.

Nov 3, 2011 3:42 PM in response to TimothyW

I'm running a 3GS... I had the exact issue described. I am also using activesync for e-mail. When I first installed iOS 5, notification center was acting badly as the original post describes. I killed some of the items from Notification Center and it did not make battery life better (0% remaining after 8 hours). I took everything out of Notification Center (including the weather app) and battery life is back to what I am used to.~60% remaining after 8 hours of medium use.

I never turned off any of the location services... didn't seem like the issue.

Nov 7, 2011 1:52 AM in response to TimothyW

Just got new 4S.
Outrageous battery consumption.
I had to turn off most functions, as suggested by several other users around the world, and still the battery lasts only a day.
My previous iPhone, a 3G, would last 3 to 4 days with same usage.
And then again: what sense does it make to turn off all nice options
just to have a decent battery range?
Like having a Ferrari and going at 20 mph to spare the engine.
I'm very disappointed.

iPhone 4S Poor Battery Performance SOLVED!!

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