Iphone 4s Battery life WORSE with upgrade. Anyone else seeing same?

I installed iOS5.0.1 and it remedied some of the battery depletion issues I was experiencing. Not all though. While it depletes the battery at a slower rate, the battery still goes down at a higher rate than my old iPhone 4 did under exactly the same useage style. The only way that i have been able to approximate my prior battery life has been to turn off the cloud back up. Then my phone seems to be fine.

Kris,

You may be right on about the active sync.

In the iPhone 3S, 4, and now the 4S I too had problems that lead me to believe active sync to the cloud was a the problem. I have a brain freeze and for the life of me can't remember what Apple called the cloud before the current iCloud. In any case to the best of my recollection I deleted the on-line email accounts that used the cloud (active on-line sync) as part of my effort to fix the battery drain problem. Back on the 3S and 4 (wish I had kept records) I believe that fixed my battery problems.

But I didn't follow an organized procedure in my efforts to gain resolution of the battery problem. So for a time I used the phone with a whole lot of stuff including active sync and apple mail (xxx.me.com) and the phone(s)started preforming reasonably well.

I then read a post that said something similar to what you said "You shouldn't have to use a crippled phone" So I got mad because I agreed with this person about a crippled phone and turned everything back on except the active sync and apples in the cloud sync stuff. I just used my own xxx.att.com email in push mode and the battery life remained good.

But I was not completely happy with the battery life so I thought I would follow some of the other suggestions (the ones that the poster here "AZREO" says are "Urban Legends" and of no value).

I reset my phone as new did not restore from a backup and manually added back my att mail and never reinstated any "Cloud" mail or active sync and my battery life was outstanding at least to the point that I didn't have to recharge more than approx every day and a half with the way I use the phone. I make the distinction on my usage because it will obviously depend on how each uses the their phone.

My current Battery stats after reset as new and manually adding back my email account and not reinstating iCloud is below. Prior to this process my battery from 100% when I got up for the day would be down to about 50-60 percent by early evening. So while my phone is crippled in the sense that I can't/won't use any of the active sync or iCloud mail everything else is on push, location service, bluetooth and WiFi. And all of these items are on continuously.

Usage 3 Hours 18 minutes
Standby 2 Days 9 hours
Calls 35 minutes
Remaining Battery is @ 48 percent

I just noticed that AZREO just posted that he has mostly eliminated his problem by turning off iCloud pushes and such. I believe he is right on but I have just taken it to a little higher level and completely eliminated iCloud but all my regular email accounts are operating in "PUSH" mode with no ill-effect. The poster Jason has said pretty much the same thing as I am saying and he uses Exchange for his mail.

One more comment and this is just a subjective opinion, once the iCloud has corrupted (usually during an OS update) your email and push functions it seems to take down any push mail accounts with it which muddies the water in regards to what is really going on.

So if you want to be able to use your phone for more than 8 hours between charges first try deleting all you email accounts and then manually re-installing them. If that doesn't do it restore your phone as new with out iCloud and manually re-install your email accounts.

As I said in a previous post this method of recovering from excessive battery consumption is not a new tactic and has worked for lots of people from the 3S to the current 4S 5.01. Please if you have doubts just search the WEB for this problem and you will find hundreds of people that found this as AZREO claims "Urban Legend" to be their saving grace, myself included.

PLEASE BACKUP PHOTOS AND SYNC TO iTUNES PRIOR TO DOING A RESTORE "AS NEW" TO PREVENT IMPORTANT INFORMATION LOSE !!!

Please except my apology for the long winded post... but when you are huckstering snake oil you have to have a reasonably good pitch. Also you have nothing to lose by taking 30 minutes and trying what worked for me and many, many others. AZREO, I am not trolling to get your adrenalin up and I am now going dark on this subject to prevent any just outright emotional arguments from developing.

The commonality here appears to be deleting your email accounts and then setting them up again from scratch. I have completely solved all battery issues by turning OFF push to my iCloud email account but leaving push on for contacts, calendars, notes, etc. I have changed the email to fetch every 15 minutes. I have now had my phone off the charger for 3 hours and had a 20 minute phone conversation and my battery still shows 100%.

This is definitely related to push email settings, as the rest of iCloud doesn't drain my battery. The instant I turn push back on for my email, I can watch the battery percentage drop. Something with iCloud email push is broken.

AZREO,

OK - I lied about going dark.

But you are so close to proving a point one way or the other. Would you be willing to delete your iCloud email account and then manually re-install it?

The outcome of my suggestion to you would be invaluable to a lot of folk.

PS - The battery life you are now getting is phenomenally good IMHO. Now if you could get the email push working and maintain that same level of battery efficiency... well your tech status would rise to the level of the Gods. 😉

Count me as another who believes my battery life has gotten worse with the update. While I don't keep anything active that I don't use, I am loathe to 'dumb' down my phone in an attempt to get more battery life out of it. I will try AZREO's suggestion of turning off push on my iCloud account (or are you suggesting that ALL push accounts be changed to fetch?).

HomanGT,

I did as you suggested around noon (2 hours ago). I deleted my iCloud email and re-added. I was at around 97% at the time. I have had the new account enabled w/ push for the last two hours and also had a 50 minute long phone conversation. My battery is now at 87%. Usage stats show the following:

Usage: 1 hour 1 minute

Standby: 3 hours, 57 minutes

Cellular Data: 1.3 MB sent, 5.9 MB received

Since I'm working, it's difficult to isolate the variables. My impression is that deleting and re-adding the account definitely helped. I believe at this point in the day yesterday I was in the 60-70% range. But different days yield different variables so this is a tough nut to crack. My bets are still on a push email issue.

Running 5.0.1. Starting with a full charge today, I barely even looked at my phone this morning, and by lunchtime it was at 43%. It's now a few hours since, and I'm at 18%.

I have not made a single call, I don't have any location-based reminders active, and I even rebooted the phone at one point, just to make sure anything extraneous wasn't running. No luck.

Again, I'm not even using the phone and the battery is draining. It was not this bad with 5.0.

David,

Regardless of the conversations going on here I would strongly suggest you try one of three things and do it reasonably fast; here is why.

That kind of battery drain can damage your battery especially if you notice the phone getting very warm !!!

1. try some of the suggestions or all of them posted in this thread.

2. If you don't want to do any of the tricks posted here then stop using your phone.

3. If you go with "I don't want to play with the suggestions here" then please take your phone to a Genius Bar straight away.

Seriously - Lion Polymer Batteries are not very tolerant of being over-heated. You stand a chance of getting the drain problem fixed, think everything is now fine and a few months from now wondering why your battery doesn't hold a charge like it should.

My first iPhone -4- had a problem like you are describing and I returned it. I received a new one, it didn't kill batteries and didn't get overly warm but I did have to do the setup as new to get the battery life to be what it should be. OK, OK maybe a re-install of the email would have done the same thing. But my point is the battery drain you are describing is "just wrong" and will damage your battery if you persist in using it like that.

My two cents caveat

AZREO,

Well with that kind of usage and only a 10% battery depletion my opinion is you are in "Tall Cotton" so to say. I personally LOVE "Tall Cotton". 🙂

I here in your voice that you still feel like something is amiss, and you may be right. All I'll say is this problem has been around for several models of iPones the fix always seems to be the same. And the problem is usually associated with an OS update albeit not always.

If it helps you live with it my iPhone -4- and iPhone 4S displayed the same problem after an Apple update. After implementing the crude fix they both stayed fixed.

By the way - I completely agree that there is a PUSH conflict that crops up after and OS update. It shouldn't but I'll bet you that the OS 5.01 fix that Apple put out dealt with trying to reduce battery drain by enhancing all their existing power conservation code and never looked at the email sync and/or iCloud live sync issues. IMHO they sure never mentioned dealing with that piece of the puzzle on the iPhone -4-. Maybe they will for the 4S but I wouldn't hold my breath.

PS - I am very glad to hear that your phone no longer has to be dumbed down to function at a reasonable level. There is just nothing like an occasional victory to perk up ones day.

Here's the thing: Apple released the worst upgrade ever. If they keep this up, Apple stock will go down for good.

I don't see that happening. This battery issue is affecting less than 5% of users. Most people aren't even going to notice. And there are millions of people out there that don't even know an upgrade is available. iOS 5 is only said to be on 38% of iOS devices. Which means another 62% of users don't even know it exists. I know over 100 people with iPhone, and most of those people have never plugged it into the computer once, let alone to upgrade the software.

I can't argue regarding people hardly noticing the problems. Then again, who knows how many people are having problems.

Ok so...

Deleted my Exchange email acct and then re-configured it.

I'm only about 2 Hours into a full charge and tomorrow will really tell with regular business usage but it seems to have really helped so far. I will update tomorrow.

I was experiencing no issues with battery life until upgrading to 5.0.1. Now my iPhone 4 is going from 100% to 10% within 3 hours, the Camera app is opening but entirely unresponsive, and the phone itself becomes uncomfortably hot within 10 minutes of use, and unbearably hot to hold while recharging or using game apps.

I am legitimately concerned that my phone is going to meltdown, or start a fire on the nightstand overnight.

Mighty, have you hard reset the phone?