iPhone 4S 5.0.1 Update Improves Battery w/ Settings Reset

I have done all the steps, plus I did a hard reset after completing the battery drain/recharge. From the weekend to a full day at work on Monday, my battery performance has improved. Usage 5hrs (lots of emailing, 3 calls); Standby 2 days, 2 hrs; Battery at 1%. I left the battery drain to shutoff and then recharged. I let the iphone sit in standby overnight and woke up to 97% battery. I checked the stats and it said 25 min of usage vs 6 hr standby. Since I have my mail setup to fetch every 30 min and with 2 mail accounts, that would be 24 times the iphone checked email so it makes sense for the usage to be around 25 min mark.

Settings for me:

Bluetooth = off

Notifications = all on except for calendar notifications

Location Services = under system services; all on except timezone and iAds

iCloud = photostream and documents/data are on

Mail = push at the top menu; under advance, I set all my emails plus the iCloud to fetch

Sync to Itunes = on

One check if the battery life does not improve would be to let the phone sit in standby overnight without a charge; note the usage before then after waking up check the usage again. If the usage seems abnormally high (should be minutes of usage especially if your mail is set to fetch), then you probably still have some type of operation running. If not, then you may truely have a battery issue.

I did notice an interesting post in a different discussion topic from ZDNet on Nov 14. It suggests the issue is related to configuration setup and software.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/test-suggests-iphone-battery-issue-not-a-hard ware-problem/16250

Thanks, davidch!

Seems to have worked perfectly well for me.

Before:

Charged on Sunday. 100% Sunday evening. Stand-by over the night. Monday morning after waking up only 50+%. Roughly 5% loss per hour in stand-by.

Shock!

First I tried some of the "simpler solutions on Monday (locations off, iCloud off, most notifications off).

But I could still literally watch the battery percentage drop lower while looking for a solution.

After following your suggesntions:

Reset all settings, drained the battery and re-charged (iphone switched off during charge) on Monday.

100% Monday evening.

Tuesday afternoon after only light use (only some telephone calls) still 88% (20 hours stand-by, 1 hour usage)..

With settings now pretty similar to yours.

Seems that my initial mistake was restoring from an itunes backup (iphone 3G to iphone 4s).

Somewhere in "there" must have been a problem causing the iphone to try and do "something" in stand-by (Wifi connection at home).

I courious on this battery issue, On my 4S I didn't think my battery life was too bad as I got though the day with reasonable use. Now I switched over to show % battery life and it seems to be dropping fairly fast. Those of you with fast drain issues, do any of you have you battery meter set with the % turned off and still experiencing fast drain? Turn on % about 30 min ago and have lost 7% on my battery, seems like it's draining faster with the % turned on. Maybe the problem is only the percent monitor program mis-calculating the battery level. I turned it off again and battery seems to be back to normal. I'm still running 5.0.

Many thanks, davidch!

It works on my iphone 4s too.

After applying the 5.0.1 update I had a large battery drain rate, about 8% overnight. I didn't have any battery problems with ios 5.

Yesterday I made a reset of all setting on my Iphone and then fully charged the battery. It took a lot of time to charge from 95% to 100%, almost 1 hour, isn't that strange?

This morning I saw that my battery was at 99%! Great!

thanks again

Hi

I've been following this thread and just wondered whether the problem is isolated to certain geographical places. I'm in the UK and both myself and my housemate got Iphone 4s last week on the same network (O2).

Neither of us really noticed a battery life problem beyond what we expected from an iphone but since the update I followed davidch's advice and so far my battery is:

79% for 16hours 54minutes standby, 1hour 8 minutes of usage

Usage has been light (texting, some wifi checking email, fiddling about with reminders etc)

Does that sound right? Good? Bad?

I think with normal everyday usage 2 days out of an iphone is about right. Heavy business use maybe a good full day?

Battery is at 62% with 1 h 32 m usage, 5 h 54 mins standby. It's still really bad :(

Well I admit that I was never having a battery problem with my 4s while on ios 5, or ios 5.0.1. However, I did follow the instructions outlined by davidch, and then tweaked some of my phone settings:

- push notifications/notification centre on for phone, calendar, reminders, messaging and sports updates

- wifi off (unless at home)

- cellular data on (all the time)

- locations services on for weather and maps; off for everything else, including system services

- Siri on (but not raise to speak)

- one mail account set to fetch hourly

- iCloud not used (yes, I sync manually - no wifi syncing or backup for me)

- Ping off under restrictions menu

Then, I pretty much used the phone as often as I could for games, texting, mail, a few phone calls, and web browsing. The phone got warm for a bit, but never hot. I ended up with the following stats about 20 minutes before the phone shutoff by itself:

- standy-by time (basically the total amount of time the phone is on) = 28 hr 54 mins

- usage time = 10 hr 4 mins

Another important note is that I would put my phone into airplane mode while sleeping, resulting in only 1-2% drop over 7 hours.

So the average rate of battery drain was 3.46% per hour, for about 29 hours of total on-time.

I would not normally use my phone this much in such a short time. After a full charge, I am at:

- stand-by = 33 hours

- usage = 4 hr 42 mins

- battery percentage left = 41%

I am convinced that what people are experiencing is either 1) a software problem likely associated with various phone settings (i.e. importing previous backups, etc), or 2) a defective batch of phone batteries.

I would second the recommendation that people set up the phone as new and reload all apps, music, photos, etc, to their phone (stay away from previous backups). This will take time but may result in an improvement. Use davidch's techniques and then tweak all menu and sub-menu settings to match your needs.

Great post and advice davidch. I have read through the thread and tried your advice but unfortunately haven't noticed a huge difference. Right now on the 4S for verizon I have:

Usage= 2hr 29min

Standby=17hr 59min

Battery Left= 58%

This seems kind of ok but I am using it very lightly (light safari, txting, words with friends) and since I have had the 4S phone I can never get the usage over about 4 1/2 to 5 hours. This is my first iphone and it seems some users on this thread can get 6-9 hours and if I could get in that range I would be extremly satisfied with this over my previous android phones.

I was wondering if doing a "hard reset" would make a difference and if I did one should I let my phone drain down all the way and charge all the way back up before doing one? Also my phone seems to charge incredibly fast as I can do a full charge in about just over 2 hours. My old android used to take forever. Is this pretty normal on the iphones? Any advice would be very appreciated! Thanks!

My battery is horrendous compared to everyone else's, and I reset the Settigs twice! This is so frustrating! 56% after 1 h 53 m of Usage and 7 h 37 m Standby.

I'm losing hope… :(

Now it's 47% after 2 h 20 m Usage and 7 h 56 m Standby.

I'm worried that I might have to completely restore my phone. What do you guys think? How long would this process take?

Battery is at 34% after 2 hours, 48 minuets of Usage, and 8 hours, 58 minuets of Standby. Wow. 😢

I've been following this thread, and have tried the suggestions listed above with a slight improvement on my battery life on the 4s. In the massive (400+ pager) thread, one of the things that I am trying to find, and may... or may not... matter, is the carrier of your phone, and size. I'm guessing that the size is far less important...

My experience is that when I charge my 4s overnight, I don't get to 100%, even after 2 full discharges. When I grab the phone in the morning, it's at 96%. The cable is securely plugged in, and the outlet is good. If I unplug the phone for a second, and plug it back in, it will go back up to 100%.

I'm not looking for a Verizon/AT&T/Vodafone, etc war... but due to the slight software differences between carrier models, it may matter.

I have the Verizon 4s, and an AT&T 4... both on 5.0.1.

Thanks for everyone's help and comments!

Ok so i did the reset and let the battery drain and did a full charge then I got up in the morning and went to work. After a while I checked my phone at about 1 pm it was still at 100% battery and the usage was about 6 min and the stand by about 6 hours. While I was looking the battery dropped to 99% from then on it just seemed to drop rapidly dropping to 96% within 5 min. Has anyone else found the first 1% seems to last ages then it drops rapidly after?

Yesterday, I found that going from 100% to 99% took around 3 hours. Then from 99% to around 80% took another 7 hours. (That was after resetting all the settings)

This morning, 100% to 99% happened much sooner.

I decided not to worry about it. After that, I turned off the Battery Percentage indicator, as I have other things in life to worry about. No sense in getting preoccupied whenever I turned bluetooth on, or actually used my phone to browse the web. And, I'll just charge it at the end of the day.