Q: A better iPhone 4s battery life

So , this is what we should be getting ... If not

There's a bug and hope we get a software update

Very soon ... in mean time turn off push notifications on all

Apps except a few main ones ..

Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery

Charging via USB to computer system or power adapter

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

Also, one more solution that might help

Location service, then System Services, turn off: Cell Network Search, Diagnostics and Location-Based iAds

Thanks for posting these!  The location services made a big difference but the battery life is still not great   one thing that also helped was turning off Music when not using it.

hopefully fix soon so we can actually enjoy all the cool new features without battery dying every day...

I received my iPhone 4s last week, it doesnt hold a charge for more than four hours.   This is my first iPhone and I must say I am a very "unhappy camper"    My position requires that I have 24/7 phone/data access, what do I tell  the boss... apple battery issues .... LMAO

I have most of my apps shut-down any all the location shut-offs I can do....battery still drains...  Now I have started see other issues with opening my email.........

What's a NewYorker to do....not voice/data for longer than 4 hours (thats 4 hrs will two call, 1 msg and email manual push).

Go to annabelle's posting from October 29th - summary of tips are posted. I followed every one of them and it's making a bit of a difference. I too am frustrated - high expectations as a 1st time user. But we are being assured that Apple is working on a fix. I'll be a little more patient, but I am hoping they move quick. Otherwise I will be making the switch as fast as I can to an alternative. Good luck!

My experience is that turning off Siri makes the battery life problem almost go away completely. I suppose I can do this until Apple releases a bug fix.

Battery life ***** , even less than iPone4...

Sorry to burst your bubble, but Daniel is not an Apple developer. If he was he would have been fired by now for posting as a representative of Apple.

Developers sign an NDA that restricts what they can say. It does not prevent them from posting in a forum like this, but it forbids them from saying they represent Apple. Daniel is certainly implying he works for Apple if you read his posts across forums. He does not. But a lot of the responses to his posts assume that he does work for Apple so people are reading him that way.

BTW, Apple employees sometimes DO post in the forum. When they do their avatar is an Apple logo. But they also are doing so as users and on their own time, not representing Apple.

My battery life wasn't lasting more than 4 hours, even when I wasn't using it. I tried shutting off everything unnecessary in settings. That didnt help. Finally I discovered all the running applications that needed to be closed. I thought it was the same as my iPhone 3 and that when you exited an app it was closed. All I did was double tap the home button which revealed all my open applications. I held down an app until they shook then pressed the close box at the corner of the app. My phone doesn't run down the battery do quickly anymore, only about 7% for a full day of light use. Sorry if everyone already knew this, but I wanted to share what helped me.

You are right. We should be discussing how to improve battery life, rather than quirks of people who post. Over a year ago I wrote the following for the iPhone 4: New iPhone 4 battery issues.

Two things to note: First, that battery issues are not something new; the iPhone 4 had battery issues over a year ago. And so did the 3GS, 3G and Classic iPhones in their time. And, I don't think much has changed. The one addition is iCloud; if you use it iCloud will  use additional battery beyond what I listed in that post, and the trick of removing Exchange accounts and adding them back should also be tried with iCloud. And, of course, Siri will use battery (but not that much).

Some battery issues are non-issues. The iphone is not a cell phone; it is a powerful pocket computer that can also make phone calls. You can't judge it the way you would judge a standard phone that only needs to be charged once a week. it's closer to a laptop that you charge every day. So if you come from a basic cell phone your expectations will be that you can go for days between charges. That isn't the case. If you are an average user of an iPhone you will have to charge it every day or two. If you are a heavy user you may have to charge it more than once a day. Even if you came from another iPhone the 4S will probably get less battery life than your previous phone because it does more. You can't get something for nothing (First law of thermodynamics).

The only time there IS an issue is if the phone is using a lot of power on standby. This indicates a problem, but it is almost always a problem with an app, not iOS itself. It may be an Apple-provided app, of course (Mail is a common culprit). That Apple can fix. But very frequently it is Facebook; Apple can't do anything about that.

Thanks for the tip; even if some people know it there's no harm in repeating it. BTW, just because an app is shown as open it doesn't mean it is using power. SOME open apps do, but not all. Closing all of them will certainly stop the ones that are using power, but you could probably narrow it to the one or two that are the actual culprits.

I have a 3GS and also noticed with iOS 5 update the battery life reduced dramatically.

One thing that I think has helped it is turning off the location services in the weather app.  I suspected that the weather widget in notifications was frequently using my location and therefore using excessive battery power.  Given that I spend most of my time in one area I don't need the app to constantly update the forecast based on location.