After installing the update make sure you reset all setttings. I have done a few updates now and have had much better sucess after settings reset all. Standby drain has been virtually eliminated from 2-4% hr before update. It is located in settings/reset//reset all settings. You loose some wifi and desktop settings, but data, apps, etc remain intact.
BradSK wrote:
Hi all, just posting for some advice regarding a system restore.
It seems as though most people have had success after doing a system restore and setting up as a new phone (when I updates to 5.0.1 I needed to restore but chose iCloud backup instead). I am reluctant to lose too much info, so could someone advise me as to what kind of data would be lost a d what could be recovered from the cloud (not via restore but from my old phone)? I know things like apps and music would have to resynced but that's not a problem.
Thanks
Before doing a system restore, try the steps below. Corrupt system level settings created by an iOS 5 bug in the original release that caused battery recalibration issues, etc. Just installing the update does not fix the issue in most cases (sometime it initially can be worse). You need to clear out those settings and recalibate the battery. For those still having the "standby battery drain" issue follow the procedure below in order. It does fix the problem in most cases.
Go through these steps to address the battery after updating to iOS 5.0.1:
1. Reset all settings (settings app-> general-> reset)
2. Go through initial setup steps (lang, wifi, siri, enable location, etc) and choose "setup as new phone" (don't worry your apps, data, contacts, mail photos, will still be there). At this point, Do NOT restore from iCloud or iTunes (It can copy back corrupt settings)
3. Turn off system location services timezone and iAd
4. Fully discharge battery (till it shuts off with the spinning wheel)
5. Fully recharge battery (overnight if possible)
In my experience this improves the Standby battery drain issue significantly in most cases. It reduces drain from 2-4% or more per hr to 0.5% or less. It has worked for many, many users now. If it does not work after a few try's you may have a real battery or hardware issue and should contact Apple. Good Luck!
I followed the original directions and have the following results:
30% battery life remaining
Usage: 5 hours, 13 minutes
Standby: 20 hours, 38 minutes
This is DRAMATICALLY better than it was before (I was loosing 10% per hour). I'm going to run this charge down completely and do the same on the next charge. Thank you all SO MUCH for your help!
Old_Mac_User wrote:
I have horrible battery life with my 4s ... Reset and am now draining the battery prior to doing a full charge. Will let you know my results.
Barry1616 wrote:
Thanks again David.
Round 2 update:
1%
7hrs 21min usage
1day standby
I think this is about average, and decent battery life. I figured after reading all these posts, and what I've seen so far if you are around 3-4hrs at 50-60% battery then you are about average.
I'm not sure if it's worth another charge cycle, so I'll probably just now keep it charged as much as possible and do a monthly drain.
Thanks
This looks to be good. Glad it worked. 1-3 full discharge/full charge should do it. After that I would just back to your routine (mine is typically charge every night even if it is no where near empty). Then, do a full discharge/full charge about every 3 months or so. Enjoy you phone and try not to think too much about it anymore. Some folks are even turning off there % icon now which is nice to hear... 😀
viewfly wrote:
jrez wrote:
Ok well I let the battery go to completely dead. Recharged to a 100% percent and reset the phone again. I'm still not seeing much by way of battery life. I'm at 1hr45 min usage with 4hr6min standby and I'm down to 64% battery. I wouldn't mind going back to 5.0. At least I could get 4 hrs of usage and over 24 on standby
I don't think you want to discharge/recharge and then reset. Reset first and then do the battery cycle. davidch correct me if I'm wrong, but resetting loses the battery calibration, so that should be done first.
that is correct. it needs to be done in that exact order to work
Nano Bagonghi wrote:
Sure!
I did it three times, but no effect... 😟
In my opinion, there is something wrong going on in background that drains the battery (and that's why the "Usage" stat is way higher than the real usage time...).
Maybe my settings are different from yours, and the bug is there.... :\
I just tried another method (from another user here in the Apple Support Forum)... Tomorrow I'll be out town all day, so I'll definitely find out if this works!
Here is the quote:
"
Sob...I solved my phantom usage issues (for me it was necessary to: turn off siri raise to speak + reset, logoff appstore, remove all accounts including icloud, reset network settings and then re-add).
Now my drain in 1-2% hr or less (in standby, no difference if I use wifi or cellular data), but when I use the iPhone (checking mail, surfing web) the battery drains very fast."
(source: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3391947?answerId=16835410022#16835410022)
nano,
ok and corrupt mail accounts with hung messages, etc can cause unexpected battery drain. deleting you email accounts and recreating them can fix it in most cirucstances. also, you may want to turn off some of you iCloud stuff temporarily to see if that may be an issue. i am currently using just mail and reminders, but plan to add more next week.
Smileyiiz wrote:
This did the job! My standby battery life is superb. After it was unplugged, it battery remained at 100% for close to 6 hrs...I started to use my phone heavily afterwards.
And when I say "heavy use" I mean Airplay streaming, gaming, reading, emailing, texting, Facebooking, etc... Didn't do a quantitative analysis of the actual time spent on each, but I am happy with the results.
Thank you everyone for posting up your tips and suggestions. I did reset twice, and let the battery go through 2 cycles. So far, it seems like the battery is better calibrated for optimal usage.
I am a happy camper here. 😁
good to hear it worked out and thanks for coming back and posting your success. enjoy your new iPhone 🙂
This seemed to do the trick with my phone.
I had a better battery life than others with 5.0. I then did the 5.01 update and it made my battery worse. I did this update today, and after following the steps for resetting the phone, it took me a really long time to try and kill the battery when it was at 50% when I had done this process. I had turned off wifi, and then I had Pandora running in the background while purposefully going to junk pages in Safari. Litterally took me 3+ hours to drain the battery.
Before I reset the settings, I was losing 1% almost every minute with browsing through Safari. Now it seems like my battery will go all day without problems.
I think I figure out my battery draining issue overnight. Before I was losing 20% over night, and the usage was high even while sleeping.
Turning off all Location Services makes the battery last.
Night 1: Battery 35%, Usage 3hrs 30mins, StandBy 13hrs 45mins
Next Morn: Battery 27%, Usage 3hrs 42mins, StandBy 20hrs 31mins
Night 2: Battery 69%, Usage 1hr 57min, StandBy 11hrs 23min
Next Morn: Battery 63%, 2hrs 10 mins, StandBy 20hrs 34mins
The Location Services I had on were: Camera, Maps, Siri, Weather, Find My iPhone
Pretty sure there must be a bug in Location Services or one of them that causes high usage and batter drain.
Bad Apple, Bad! 🙂
ajrunner wrote:
I think I figure out my battery draining issue overnight. Before I was losing 20% over night, and the usage was high even while sleeping.
Turning off all Location Services makes the battery last.
Night 1: Battery 35%, Usage 3hrs 30mins, StandBy 13hrs 45mins
Next Morn: Battery 27%, Usage 3hrs 42mins, StandBy 20hrs 31mins
Night 2: Battery 69%, Usage 1hr 57min, StandBy 11hrs 23min
Next Morn: Battery 63%, 2hrs 10 mins, StandBy 20hrs 34mins
The Location Services I had on were: Camera, Maps, Siri, Weather, Find My iPhone
Pretty sure there must be a bug in Location Services or one of them that causes high usage and batter drain.
Bad Apple, Bad! 🙂
aj,
i have all those location service running except "Find My iPhone". not having any issues anymore. did you run though my reset all settings, discharge and recharge process?
Hi, well I'm back! I must say that after the frustration last night and before heading off to the shop today, I decided to do another complete phone reset and let the phone charge up to 100% then I went and tuned the phone with the three settings only that I made particular attention to, with thanks going to davidch!
After reset and 100% charge, I left iCloud disabled; turned of cell network search; set my carrier manually; and left Siri disabled.
I have everything else up and running including push and fetch email, notifications (all) , location services (excluding cell network search as I said) although I am yet to setup sync with iTunes, but I can tell everyone that I have lost only 15% of battery life after 9+ hours including a few phone calls and wifi.
More testing needed but I too believe that something gets stuck and canes the battery to no end, which I never experienced with my iphone4.
I will be in touch, thanks again.
Hi Everybody,
I noticed this problem as well, and after much investagation I fdound after I did the update my bluetooth had been turned on and was constantly searching.
I turned it off, and "Hey Presto" no more problem.
Hope this helps someone out there.
Denis.
davidch wrote:
Nano Bagonghi wrote:
Sure!
I did it three times, but no effect... 😟
In my opinion, there is something wrong going on in background that drains the battery (and that's why the "Usage" stat is way higher than the real usage time...).
Maybe my settings are different from yours, and the bug is there.... :\
I just tried another method (from another user here in the Apple Support Forum)... Tomorrow I'll be out town all day, so I'll definitely find out if this works!
Here is the quote:
"
Sob...I solved my phantom usage issues (for me it was necessary to: turn off siri raise to speak + reset, logoff appstore, remove all accounts including icloud, reset network settings and then re-add).
Now my drain in 1-2% hr or less (in standby, no difference if I use wifi or cellular data), but when I use the iPhone (checking mail, surfing web) the battery drains very fast."
(source: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3391947?answerId=16835410022#16835410022)
nano,
ok and corrupt mail accounts with hung messages, etc can cause unexpected battery drain. deleting you email accounts and recreating them can fix it in most cirucstances. also, you may want to turn off some of you iCloud stuff temporarily to see if that may be an issue. i am currently using just mail and reminders, but plan to add more next week.
Things here seems to be much better now... My standby usage is no more 6%/hour.
I have lost 10% in 8 hour, this night... It seems good to me!
Anyway, I'm not 100% happy yet...
On sunday I was in a low signal area, and I've lost 10% in the first hour, and 3% in the next hours... (and my phone was in a bag, so really no usage...)
I really hope that 5.0.2 will fix all of theese bugs...
Guys,
Good News!!! In fact Great News!!
After I did the "Reset phone settings" --> Battery drain to NIL --> Recharge to FULL --> + 2-3 hours of more recharge, I am getting a significantly HIGH improvement.
Almost 7 hours now on STANDBY and battery still at 100% (can't believe it... 🙂 🙂)
Earlier it was draining like 20-25 % in 4 hours.
This is huge improvement!! I think my battery problem is solved. 🙂 🙂
Keeping fingers crossed for some more time now...so to check if the battery works normally with the Wifi, location services, and other stuff.
(iPhone 4S 64 GB iOS 5.0.1)
Monalizard wrote:
Hi Davidch,
I just followed your step. After I reset all the setting the battery remaining percentage was 5%, after 3 hours of standby the battery is still 5%. Comparing to earlier today before following your steps my phone was draining 1% for each 30 minutes standby. If using the phone for e.g. texting, 3G for a few minutes, I can see the battery draining 1% per minute. Now I am recharging my battery to full recharge and will see whether it is improved or not.
However, I have some questions. This is my first iphone (I bought 4s). I really have no ideas whether my phone battery is OK or not. So here is the statistics:
Usage: 4 Hours 7 Minutes
Standby 14 Hours, 32 Minutes
Battery Percentage left: 21%
Talked time: 7 Minutes
IOS 5.0.1
I have turned off everything: no push mail, location services, notifications, SIRI, bluetooth, wifi, cellular data etc. Is my battery OK? This statistics is just before I reset the all the settings. After I reset, the standby time is 1 day and the battery remaining is 1%.
Thanks for your answer.
0.5% drain per hour in standy is normal. stats also look ok
I have followed DavidCH's instructions and had pretty good luck improving my battery life since I upgraded to iOS 5.0.1. The biggest help has been doing a Reset All Settings reset and then fully draining the battery and fully recharging it a few times.
But I still felt that I could be getting better battery life even though I could go a full day, 6 am till midnight, with what is normal usage for me, i.e. 10 - 12 phone calls, some web surfing, manually check email every couple of hours, playing about 30 - 40 minutes of some of my games, IMDB searches, facebook and twitter checks a couple times a day, check the weather in the AM before leaving the house, reading iBooks or Kindle books, for about 30 minutes at the end of the day. Doing all this without any time spent on the charger during the day left me at about 20 - 25% battery life left. I would then watch a couple of YouTube videos to fully drain the battery if I was going to do a full drain and recharge cycle as this really seems to condition the battery and battery meter (Which I think is probably a culprit in this whole problem). But as I said I thought I should be getting better life than this even. You know, new phone new battery using only the minimum number of notifications and locations.
Yesterday I spent the day in a training room in the building I work in that appears to have much better 3G reception than I do at my desk (My desk is next to a window facing north in the AT&T center in Los Angeles, pretty ironic isn't it?) Anyway, I walked to the training room on the west side of the building on the same floor, less than 300 feet from my desk and managed to get 3 - 5 bars all day long. And guess what, I had 85% battery left at 4 in the afternoon!!! I obviously wasn't using my phone as much being in a training class, but I did do some emails, web searches, etc.
My guess is that since I was getting a much stronger signal the phone didn't have to keep checking for a 3G connection (See my rant about why did Apple take away the option to turn off 3G on the iPhoen 4S) So without having to constantly search out a 3G connection, the battery didn't take the pounding it does at my desk where I get 1 - 2 bars of service when the phone doesn't drop out of 3G altogether and start searching for a 3G connection, over and over and over.
Back at my desk today and I am seeing 1 - 2 % drain just sitting on my desk not being used.
At home I have an AT&T MicroCell so I don't have the 3G search problem. I apparently whined enough to the customer services reps that I was one of the lucky ones to get a free MicroCell so this is a perk for me.
LucasV86 wrote:
Thanks for the tip! My iPhone 4 was draining about 3% during a 7-8 hour period while I was asleep, then skyrocketed to 8-10% after 5.0 and 5.0.1. I just reset all settings this afternoon, and the phone only drained 2% in 5 hours! I'm letting the battery drain coimpletely, then I'll do a full recharge. Thanks again! 🙂
Lucas,
good to hear it is working out for you already. the full discharge and recharge should even impove things more. good luck.
iPhone 4S 5.0.1 Update Improves Battery w/ Settings Reset
