iOS 5.0.1 - Made my iPhone 4S battery performance worse!

Yes, cellular data (3G) is the problem with iOS 5.1, no doubt in my mind.

I don't know what kind of testing Apple is doing, to have screwed up something so basic to cell phones in a release and not notice it.

I am not sure what it entirely consists of yet, but you should try something that has dramatically improved my battery life. Take your iPhone and hook it up to your computer and manually backup photos, docs, music, ect; as in open My Computer and open the device and pull the stuff off. Also back up anything you may wanna keep, but don't back it up to anything in the Apple genre (iCloud, iStream, ect.), rather back it up to either your computer, email, or whatever means you may have.Once you have backed up everything set aside about 30mins after your phone has come to a full charge.

First, go to Settings>General>Reset>Erase all content and settings.

This will prompt you through factory resetting your phone for the most part. If along the way it ask you to set up from back up or backup from iCloud, ignore the urge and make sure you always set up as new phone. Once this is complete your phone will reboot. Once it has rebooted, set up your phone in the startup sequence to where you can get to your homescreen; don't forget to always choose set up as new phone.

Second, now that your phone seems fresh, empty, and good to go, youre just not done yet. Now hook your phone up to itunes, but make sure auto-sync is disabled. Once itunes has recogzined your phone, click on the device over in the left pane. Now look in the center where the restore button resides. Click restore if your battery is at 100%; if it prompts at any point to back up the phone, once again, ignore, push through and set up as a new phone if it asks. Itunes will begin downloading the iOS 5.1 operating system to your itunes, which should be about an 800mb file. As soon it completes it will initialize the restore process. Push through all prompts in the same manner you have so far (no backups, just new phone). This will take awhile, your phone is basically being formatted and wiped clean with a fresh OS installed 5.1 from the ground up, not some ******** corrupt update from 5>.

Anyways, your phone will do wierd stuff along the way and seem like it starting over, but its just firmware installation and testing; let it do its thing, it may take something like 10-15mins possibly.

Once it's done, it will reboot and it will ask you to set it up again, just like the second step. Again, set up as a new phone. Once you have pushed through everything you should be able to sync up your phone to itunes.

Thats's it! Now that may seem like something you have tried, but try at least once (I have heard of success on the second attempt for some), but this should fix it. My battery life went from 2-3hrs tops to 2 days. I don't have disable anything if I don't want, although I do disable bluetooth, location services, and system services now so I don't have to think about a culprit, but it doesnt help or hinder, except for maybe bluetooth. I do use wifi when I can, but I use the **** out of my phone now and get at least 40hrs!

I think what is happening is:

1) The 5.0.1>5.1 update is either corrupt or it is having issues updating with all the different setups each phone is using.

2) Resetting the phones settings and content before doing a full format and restore sets a better stage for 5.1 to do its thing.

3) Do this all while at 100% charge I feel sets a threshold in the software.

Now that you have it here, very important, do at least 3 full charge cycles to condition the battery with your new setup. That means you just unplugged your phone at 100%, now you need to run it down to 0%, not 1%, but shut off on its own 0%. Then without using it charge fully back to 100%, then repeat a few more times. It's very unconvient at first because the charging cycles hardly fall on your typical charging schedule, but stay strong. After my second charge cycle I was very very very pleased...

Like I said, this seems like a typical resolution, but the sequence of instructions here is the only thing that has worked for me and my girlfriends phone; don't discount any stage. My way should be attempted considering I have been through two phones and done every trick in the book, from Apple store genius bar, to deep deep deep forum thread searches. This for some reason really worked out the kinks and I think its because the landing strip was cleared for a new OS to land properly. Also, I should mention I had my microSIM card out during all this and have never put it back in. It is only needed for international travel, so I dont need it. The reason I bring this up is because it you were following my other threads and posts youll notice my mention of the SIM slot heating up... You can imagine why I removed it... Now it would be interesting if someone wanted to do a controlled version of my "fix" and do it the first time with the SIM in and see if it proves to work. If it doesnt, try it all again without the microSIM. Regardless it would nice for other users to know that it doesnt seem to be a red flag of any kind.

Everyone be proactive, if you find this works, let me know, then let others know. Don't move on and leave everyone hangin in the same brain-squashing temperment you were once in. Have a heart! If this doesnt work for you at all, please let me know also...

Thanks!

yep, had this update for a while now, tried all the calibration steps, resets, recharges, etc.. it's true: THIS UPDATE WAS A BREAKAGE NOT A FIX. Battery was ok but not great before the last update, as it was with my other iphones. Now, however, the battery drains very fast. a few percent within minutes if i'm acutally doing something on the phone. Luckily I have a charger at work, in my car, at home or i'd be drained within a few hours. Unacceptable!! Please get that next update out ASAP with a real fix.

I have updated the ios. From 5.0.1 to 5.1. Before the update, I erase all data n setting (like phonytony said). Then I update it. The battery is going crazy. I had play game, twitter, facebook, map, etc. All apps is running on the background. But my battery is amazing. It's only drained 1% for all of those app. Now, I'm still waiting the battery ready to be charged because I'm afraid the battery drained, but it makes me wait too long to the condition of ready to be charged. Amazing. After the update, the battery was looked drained fastly. But, I let it drained till it shut down by it self twice. And now, my battery life is amazing.

Btw, thanks to Mr. Phonytony who has shared the good procedure. Now, my battery is not an issue anymore. I updated it with simcard in, Mr. Phonytony.

1st world problems...just kidding. sorry about your troubles

I am having the same problem. This is my 2nd iPhone 4s replacement and upgrading to 5.1 seemed to work for a moment but now it is doing the same thing. I tried everything, even deleting free apps that show ads. Yesterday all I were doing was texting and after about 5 hrs I was down to 30%, the worse it has gotten. I must say I am not pleased. Maybe apple should limit the actual usage of both cores in the A5 dual core processor and only use it for intense applications or processes. The 4 (which my gf is on CONSTANTLY) get tenfolds better battery life than mine, and she got hers off ebay, mine is brand spanking new. And trust me, I have tried everything you can think of and nothing is working. I am gonna schedule another appointment to have my phone replaced AGAIN for a 3rd time. Maybe that extra .05ohm of battery in the 4s needs to be higher. I don't know but its ticking me off.

4S has really a hardware issue I believe. While still on warranty, I would try to check for a possible replacement. So far, I haven't seen an IOS upgrade that fixed this.

Hey just a question. After you did the restore did you load your backup or did you manually restore all of your apps and info?

I have done essentially that, reset everything and restored as a new phone, added stuff back in manually like I would with a new phone. Except I only took the battery charge down to 0% (shutting off by itself) once, not 3 times...my phone is over a year old now, so I'm a little leery about running the battery down to 0 when I don't really need to. I had never run the battery down to 0 before, usually I charge every night and this has been fine all along.

With all this, I'm still finding that with my iPhone 4 cellular data and phone calls use up more battery than they did before iOS 5.1. No problem getting through a day (or even two on the rare occasions when I forget to charge my phone at night), but when I'm at work using cellular data (3G), I can see my battery go down about 1% for 2 or 3 emails. Especially if they switch me over to safari to a web page to do more detailed reading.

At home, things are better, wifi is easier on the battery. Especially since I got my Verizon Network Extender working again, and cellular data and phone signal strength aren't essentially 0 *smile*. That really seems to help my phone battery, even though I have cellular data turned off at home. It may be that just having the phone signal strength very low causes problems, I can't tell.

Anyways, I'm pretty convinced that iOS 5.1 doesn't work as well with cellular data as preovious OS updates.

I have applied phonytony's fix, followed the instructions to the letter and I'm now charging the phone on the second charge cycle. I'm hoping the third charge cycle is the charm because battery life was horrendous after the clean install, the worst that it's ever been and that was with light usage. Fingers crossed, I'll report back.

Here's a screenshot post phonytony's fix, three charge cycles and upgrading to 5.1.1 yesterday.

Yeah I see the pic. There's no reason you should be at 85% after only an hr of usage and 3 hrs of standby. Apple needs to do something because it is clearly a hardware issue.

Wish I had visited this thread before purchasing my Iphone today. Bought the mophie juice pack just in case I needed to go a couple of days without a charge. At two hours of usage and 3 hrs of standby and only one 30 sec. phone call, I'm at 76%. Unbelievable. I traded my Droid in hopes of better battery life. I think I'll take advantage of the 14 day return policy. It will be worth the $35 and all the accesories just to get some battery life back. Unbelievable!

Hey everyone I think I may have a legit fix! Something in my mind was telling me to try it since I tried everything in the books, the videos, and the tutorials, none of those worked so I tried this last night before I went to sleep. I woke up, went to work and throughout the day my battery has dramatically shown improvement. Usually by the end of the day (after my 8 hr shift) I am at 35% and if I send 10 messages (using siri or voice-to-text) then I lose 10% after one hr. Today 2 hrs after my work shift has ended I am at 66% which is a MASSIVE increase in battery performance. I tried this before I went to bed as I wouldn't be using it during sleep hours. I also did this with a non-fully charged phone. This is what I did...

1) Go into ALL of your apps so that they all appear in your task manager and leave them running in the background. Make sure EVERY LAST APP is running in the background, you will know by checking your task manager.

2) Turn on all the battery sucking features if you have them off (i.e. bluetooth, notifications, location services, etc.) You can even turn your brightness all the way up if you like, and set the auto-lock to NEVER so it stays on (yes I know the screen won't turn off if youtube is running but this is in case your chosen video ends and you are still sleep or doing something else).

3) Go into youtube and find the longest video you can find. I found the 3hr clock video.

4) Play the long video

5) Plug phone in and start charging the phone.

6) Leave the phone and let video play for the full duration the video is.

7) Check and see if phone has reached 100%, if so then take off charger and change your phone settings back to your preferred settings (bluetooth off, preferred time of auto-lock, lowering screen brightness, etc)

8)Your phone is now ready to use

Your phone should show improved battery life. Oh I also turned off 3g for an hour but that is because my phone sometimes searches for 3g reception for too long as my reception at work isn't all that, even with data roaming. The whole idea of doing this is simply breaking in the battery and the dual core processor. I was simply allowing the A5 dual core to figure out how to run efficiently without draining too much battery and as for the battery, when you charge there is a rapid charge going on, it is rushed and not allowing the battery to fully charge itself. With apps running and other things running it slows down the rapid recharge (the equivalent of someone holding your shirt while you are trying to run) allowing it to fully charge at each percent. So in short the rapid recharge in the iphone may be faulty and the charge job from it is rushed. Feel free to try this and let me know how this works for you.

Good Luck!!

Oh and might I mention, it is upon your freewill to try this fix, I am in no way telling you or forcing you to do this so not responsible for any damage this might do, but it shouldn't damage anything. This fix is recommended for those who have issues with their battery in their iPhone 4S.

I forgot to mention this is only day one of my results. I will post in the following weeks to let you know if this fix sticks.