Would this cause my battery life to go bye bye?

Hey Folks, i have a iphone 4s. Love it. Love it. Love it. Well 2 nights ago I got a message saying that I was close to filling up my HD. I have a 16 gig iPhone.

So the 1st thing I did was plug the phone into my macbook. Thus moving all my photos off my phone over to iphoto. That didn't really clear up too much space so I removed about 10 apps that I don't use. that freed up about 1.5 gig.

Ever since then.... my battery life is bad. Bad in the sense that I had 50% when I went to be and woke up and the phone was dead. I took my kid for a 1 hour walk this am and lost 16%. I wasn't even using the phone during the walk.

I searched the forums and saw that maybe I should turn off location navigation (or whatever its called) but that hasn't helped.

Any thoughts?

Also, I have heard that Apple Support does great things.... think they would replace?

Lastly, if you were to get a new phone.... are you able to get all the apps you paid for again?

Cheers!

KM