annabelle

Q: A better iPhone 4s battery life

Since I got my iPhone 4s I was very disappointed with the battery life: it looks like I'm not the only one..

 

During the last days I found  several solutions that really improved my battery life

You have to read for days to find the  good tips among hundred discussions, this is why I'm sharing those here

I'm still hoping  that Apple will do something soon to improve IOS5 battery eating disorder 

 

1)  Fully charge the battery with the iPhone off

At night -or when you do not need it- plug in your iPhone to the charger , then switch it off

pulling the red tab  on the screen and let it charge.

Do not switch it off before and plug in after because

the iPhone will start back automatically

 

The battery will go to 100% and it will last  longer

This is a procedure I have done in the past even with  old iPhone and iPad and I always found that works great.

Same for laptop.

 

2)  Turn off  Setting Time Zone function

in Locations (system services). It never turns off location searching so it drains the battery.

This setting was draining my battery 3% in one hour with everything off.

 

 

3) Turn off  Diagnostic & Usage Data.

Settings > General > About > Diagnostic & Usage > Diagnostic & Usage Data.

Another big improvement

 

4) Brightness at the minimum you can stand

 

5) iCloud  off

I use it to sync when I'm at home and with wi-fi for now: hopefully Apple will come up with some fixes

 

I had to kill several operations to get a decent battery life: I do not think this is what you need to do when you buy an expensive phone

Everything should work fine and the battery last as long as promised...

 

6) No iCloud cellular use

Settings > iCloud > Documents & Data > Use Cellular = OFF

 

7)  Turn off Time Zone and Ask to join networks

 

8) Do not leave iMessage in standby when you do not use it

Quit as soon as you finish sending messages

 

 

Thanks to everyone who suggested all these tricks : it's difficult to go back and find them all but

my gratitude goes to all of you !


iPhone 4S, iOS 5

Posted on Oct 29, 2011 2:32 PM

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Q: A better iPhone 4s battery life

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  • by bernhardfromgermany,

    bernhardfromgermany bernhardfromgermany Nov 1, 2011 8:04 AM in response to drudrewdizzy
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 1, 2011 8:04 AM in response to drudrewdizzy

    I had the described battery drain problems until yesterday (German Vodafone; restored from iphone 4) - max 4 hrs life. I then disabled the calender in the exchange mail account and enabled it again. Battery now lasts min 24hrs.

  • by AnjelHeart,

    AnjelHeart AnjelHeart Nov 1, 2011 4:29 PM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 1, 2011 4:29 PM in response to annabelle

    I switched from samsung to iphone and on the 1st day,  am VERY disappointed with the battery drain. Same phone usage pattern and significantly low battery expectency.

    And all these suggestions to turn this off that off....please... i paid a bucket full of money to dumb down this device back to 'Western electric model 500' phone? I am not interested in scale down suggestions...I am interested in a fix to the under-performing device.

  • by Ravprince,

    Ravprince Ravprince Nov 1, 2011 5:05 PM in response to AnjelHeart
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 1, 2011 5:05 PM in response to AnjelHeart

    I was very excited about my first iphone and all that excitement drained away, coz of the awful battery lfie that it offered. I had to keep closing all the apps, disbaling so many features, did a restore as suggested in these forums, but nothing seems to work. I have great respect for apple, but this new expensive product has made my life worse , instead of working the other way around. I charged it to 100% and shut off all the apps, but still the battery drained in 4 hours, without any activity. I think Apple should be honest about the specs or should have performed rigorous tests to correct this big glitch in such a famed product. I cant be happy anymore, as I wasted all my savings over the past few months on this piece of crap. I am thinking of returning my Iphone to the store and go back to my older SAMSUNG GALAXY Smartphone.

  • by cmbnova,

    cmbnova cmbnova Nov 1, 2011 6:52 PM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 1, 2011 6:52 PM in response to annabelle

    Agree--battery life truly disappointing!  I've had each iPhone so far and this is noticeably worse!! The suggestions are just silly and smack of absolutely poor testing by Apple.  Truly disappointing for this company.  Turndown brightness, disable time zone, turnoff diagnostics,turn off notifications...truly, this stuff should have been tested. Hopefully somebody at Apple is taking notice.  

  • by cmbnova,

    cmbnova cmbnova Nov 1, 2011 6:52 PM in response to bernhardfromgermany
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 1, 2011 6:52 PM in response to bernhardfromgermany

    Great...just disable my calendar and the phone will last????

  • by lennydas,

    lennydas lennydas Nov 1, 2011 7:07 PM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (15 points)
    Apple Music
    Nov 1, 2011 7:07 PM in response to annabelle

    Go to location service in the system app. Then go to the bottom and open system services. then turn off setting time zone. This should work until apple updates os5

  • by antoniofromleague city,

    antoniofromleague city antoniofromleague city Nov 2, 2011 4:51 PM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 2, 2011 4:51 PM in response to annabelle

    Battery life is really bad , I have to charge everyday by 1600 ( charging  time 1600--> 0600am), hope is only a software bug not a hardware problem or I am thinking of returning it and wait...

  • by cmbnova,

    cmbnova cmbnova Nov 2, 2011 5:04 PM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 2, 2011 5:04 PM in response to annabelle

    already adjusted the time zone thing...really not that much better...my feeling based on my normal usage is that the 4S runs out about 40% faster than the 4 that I previously have...although I've had people tell me that the same happened to their 4 when they updated to iOS5--apparently the real culprit.  Disappointing to be sure.  Hopefully Apple updates soon--although I still dont understand how this escaped the testing process!!!!

  • by Mahesh_srinivasan,

    Mahesh_srinivasan Mahesh_srinivasan Nov 3, 2011 7:26 AM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 3, 2011 7:26 AM in response to annabelle

    It has been unpredictable for me.

    -- My iPhone 4 when upgraded to iOS 5 started showing signs of reduced battery life. It was down to 50% by 1200 noon....with minimal usage

    - I picked up my iPhone 4s and now I am noticing an average drop of 1% per couple of minutes. I do have exchange sync...but I have also ensured that I am not runnign many apps. I have disabled "Timezone--location based services", but that does not seem to help. I am beginning to wonder if this is in the notifications feature of iOS 5.

    Thie morning between 630 and 700, the charge drained from 100% to 88%....unbelievable and I am not HAPPY.

  • by StevieDoo,

    StevieDoo StevieDoo Nov 3, 2011 8:46 AM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 3, 2011 8:46 AM in response to annabelle

    This was a problem with the iphone 4. We spent hours in the apple store and online trying to convince apple that the problem was real. They were in full denial mode. It got so frustrating that  I lost it, a little , because of the arrogant attitude of the store employees and me and my kids got booted out of the store.

    Turns out we were right... Makes me question my loyalty to Apple!

  • by pmascard,

    pmascard pmascard Nov 4, 2011 4:57 AM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 4, 2011 4:57 AM in response to annabelle

    I too was having poor battery drain with my 4s as well as only charging to 97% overnight! I was running the phone out of the box with iCloud, Exchange and Gmail accounts.

     

    Having browsed several posts on the subjects, I reset my 4s to a "New Phone", added only my iCloud account, disabled the Time Zone location services. Having used Battery Magic to fully charge the phone I got 100% charge and 48 hours with only slightly less than normal usage. A good result I felt.

     

    Adding the Exchange account reduced this to around 38 hours which I thought was not too bad considering my HTC Desire needed an overnight charge every day.

     

    Eventually I thought it had all stabilised and loaded by full music library and selected apps making sure all auto settings, location services and notifications were off for the new apps. So basically I felt that I should still get the 38 hour life, possibly a bit less because I would use the phone a little more. Wrong. I now just about get 24 hours.

     

    I refuse to believe that filling "disk" space would have an effect but it certainly feels like that to me. Perhaps iOS keeps tabs on the "disk" to reduce corruptions and to keep sectors clean?

     

    Just adding my experience to the collective and I am only mising my Android a little having moved to iOS!

  • by HAL 9000 Computer,

    HAL 9000 Computer HAL 9000 Computer Nov 4, 2011 5:00 AM in response to pmascard
    Level 2 (265 points)
    Nov 4, 2011 5:00 AM in response to pmascard

    Apple is working on a software update to address the battery draining.

    It appears that there's a bug in the process in iOS 5 to determine your time zone automatically.

    They have already seeded iOS 5.0.1 to developers and it should be available to end users in the coming weeks.

  • by jewba35,

    jewba35 jewba35 Nov 4, 2011 7:15 AM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 4, 2011 7:15 AM in response to annabelle

    I upgraded my ipone 4 to ios5 and had the same issue.  I did the same thing everybody did and turned all the cool fetures off, I even went to apple.  I could litterally watch the batter drop.  I started looking again and found a new feature on ios 5 called diagnostics & usage under settings, general, about.  If you click on it and changed to don't send rather than automatic send your battery life will be back to normal.  I looked up the reoports it was sending down where it says diagnostic & usage data, and found my phone was sending out around 200 reports a day back to apple.  This is what was draining my battery and most likely yours too.  Apple uses this to help diagnose problems with the ios and apps.  Good Luck!

  • by binary2001,

    binary2001 binary2001 Nov 4, 2011 12:46 PM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 4, 2011 12:46 PM in response to annabelle
    I've experience the same battery issue with my phone, but I think I might have it narrowed down.

     

    I use MS Exchange for mail, so first, I've disable the Notifications for Calendar and Reminders by going to Settings & Notifications. In the Notifcation Center click on Calendar and select Off, and the same process for the Reminders.  This helped with the "jitter" problem that I was receiving in the notifications.

     

    For Siri, I went to Settings / General / Siri and turned off the Raise to Speak feature. The theory behind disabling this service is that the iPhone is not monitoring the light activity from its sensor.

     

    Right now, with both of these off, I've noticed an improvement with my battery.  It's cold to the touch and I haven't charged my battery for over 24 hours now.

     

     

  • by Pete Nik,

    Pete Nik Pete Nik Nov 4, 2011 6:12 PM in response to annabelle
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Nov 4, 2011 6:12 PM in response to annabelle

    Charged my phone to 93% around 4pm, it's 9.09pm and its down to 57%? I expected so much more from Apple, maybe they can fix this glitch, albeit known, this is what you get with HYPE with a new product and their own greed. Thankfully I have full faith for now that APPLE can overcome adversity and come out with a patch that will reduce battery usuage without people's fault. Don't let me down APPLE!!! Keep in mind heard DROID is even worse so....

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