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

Well I'm happy to report 5.1 has solved my battery issue. Prior to 5.1 my 4S would last 4-5 hours tips under light-normal usage. After the update, I've been nowhere near a charger for 6 hours now under light use and battery is still at 68%.  This is case solved to me, sorry to anyone else still suffering, I hated my 4S before Wednesday and had chargers stashed everywhere.  Now I feel like I have my 4 battery life back, with my trusty companion Siri along for the ride.

Thanks Apple!!

I've updated my 4s to 5.1 9b179. My battery life is better but not sufficient for me.

My 4s battery drains by 1% every 5 minute on video playback.

It drains 1% every 3 minute while using internet on 3g

Now after turning of the cellular data with 3g,

It drains 1% every 4 minute on video playback,

is it means apple ios 5.1 has still bugs affecting battery life???

I was traveling out of town today,.

My iphone full charge at 9am (100%) and i got home at 10:16pm (1%),.

Here is my statistic

Usage during the trip :

1. WiFi Off

2. Celullar Data (3G) On

3. SMS almost often

4. Online Game (PyramidVille & Flight Tycoon)

5. GPS and Maps (i use it for navigation about one-half hour)

6. Yahoo Messenger always on

7. Facebook & Facebook Messenger always on

8. I have 4 mail account and fetch every 15 minutes

Compared to WiFi, 3G make my iphone battery more quickly exhausted. Plus the use of GPS and Maps for navigation, it's really drain my iphone battery,.

******I FIXED MY BATTERY ISSUE******  : Check out my previous posts on this thread as well. I was like everyone else with my battery at 30% at the end of the day doing little I nothing.

I now have 80% at the end of the day using wifi and tons of apps.

The main things to change is the mail from fetch to manual. Turn off everything in iCloud except for pictures and bookmarks.(there's bugs in iCloud). I did this and tried some stuff in the link below but changed it back since my battery is fine with them on. I have wifi an Bluetooth on with location services for a lot of stuff as well and still have great power usage.

I also highly reccomended the app AAI or other free CPU monitoring programs. Close everything out except for the app and let it sit and watch it. It shouldn't be over 10 except for 1 sec every 10 sec or so. If you watch it for a whole like I did it was really high for no reason.

http://gdgt.com/discuss/bad-battery-life-in-ios-5-gpn/

Check out the comments at the end of the link. Most people had one of a few things happening that worked for them. I did all of them.

1) CPU running full time

2) icloud issues with contacts and other stuff

3) Location services

4) Mail moved automatically to push instead of manual

5) Calendar sync issues

I downloaded a free cpu monitor (AAi) and went through all of their suggestions one by one. I had a few things eating up my CPU running at 60%+ when nothing was running and iCloud doing something eating up power.

THX for the the suggestion, BryGuy2 – bugs in iCloud might be the cause of this battery debacle. I'm gonna try this out and give a feedback in a couple of days as soon as I know more.

But what about the Apple engineers - are they blind or stupid? Do the users have to solve the problems caused by those bozos (as Steve Jobs would call them). It seems to me that they just want to sell their new gadgets and let the users out in the rain for  months with their daily iPhone problems. Micro$oft couldn't handle it worse.

This is nonsense people. Why are you complaining? Are you taking all the steps needed to improve your battery life?

My guess is that over half of you who are complaining haven't done full restore and set up as new phone. It's so old news that if you have some sort of trouble with your phone and you restore then you don't restore from previous backup which might have "bad" files in it.

Therefore I strongly recommend restoring and setting up as new phone.

This is my iPhone 4S after 5.1 update. Restored and set up as new.

3G on

Push mail on

Locations off

Wifi off

About an hour of that usage came from calls. Another hour from browsing web on 3G. Pretty much all that 3 hours that's left in usage time came from playing Real Racing 2 (Very graphic and battery intensive game) using HDMI cable and gaming on TV screen. I probably could've pushed my battery even further without gaming. 3 days and still plenty of battery remaining. I used to drop from 100% to around 85% overnight with phantom usage and what not. Now when i took my phone off charger 3 days ago before going to sleep it's showed 100% and it showed 100% even 12 hours or so later.

Hope you guys try this. I sure am happy with my phone now.

I had all the same symptoms, upgrade from 5.0 to 5.1 suddenly saw about 10 percentage points loss in battery charge per hour even when not in use, while earlier it lasted a few days with my feeble use. Tried all the tricks mentioned herein to no avail.

But a full restore did the trick for me. Now back to normal, i.e. no depletion of battery capacity at all over last few hours as it should be. Still with all normal settings, wifi, location services and whatnot running.

That's great but what do we do about ALL of our settings, etc.  All of your stocks, alarms, weather cities, backgrounds, iPhone settings, etc. will all be gone.  Is there a way to do what you said but still avoid this?

"Restore" in iTunes does it all for you, plug it in, click restore, have a coffee - all settings down to the minutest detail was back to normal at the end of the process. And obviously all the files as well.

Just to be doubly safe, do a backup prior to restore as well, but the restore did start out by doing a full backup for me.

Same problems with my IP4, since upgrade a few days ago, battery life is worse. Juice holds for about 3-4 hours only with same usage behaviour and settings like before.

Why would files/user settings from previous cause this battery consumption. And why would we as users have to deal with it and not Apple?!

Thanks a lot for your time testing BryGuy2,

this seems to have worked fine, now iphone 4 on standby does not appear to drain the battery anymore. Its been off the poweplug for 5 hours and lost 1% battery. Used email, stock exchange, photos, camera, not much but...

iCloud really seems to be the troublemaker.

This is definitely the sure option to start with before restoring, and eluding the risk to loose settings, photos etc.

Try it out people and let the others know your xp

One more in the club.

I had no problem with battery life on my 4S before 5.1, but now it drains much much faster.

We are talking 30% each night without use.

Tried a hard reset now, hope it will help. Next thing I'll try is to shut off 3G.

I know how to restore from backup.  Pestav was suggesting that we need to do a restore and setup as a new phone.  My question is how he came to terms with losing EVERYTHING as far as his settings, app data, etc went.

Well, that is exactly what the "Restore" button in iTunes does - first it restores the software and resets everything to factory settings, like a new phone, totally empty - only then it proceeds automatically to restore that "new" phone to the old settings and files from backup.

Actually, you have a choice to set up as a new phone or restore a backup of your phone, which will have all apps, data and setting. Just make sure to do a backup before doing the restore so you have the latest data from your phone.