iPhone 5 battery draining very fast

One aspect here maybe worth discussing:

I get the feeling that the percent numbers in Settings > General > Usage are not linear.

For example, I haven't left the house yet, and have been on wi-fi since restoring my iPhone. After the remaining battery time had dropped to 90% I used the Usage time to calculate out what that should mean in total possible Usage time and got 11.7 hours. "Wow!" I thought. This restore really seems to have had an effect!

Now the battery is at 59%. While dropping, I did the same calculation several times, and each time the predicted maximum Usage dropped more and more, the more I "used" it!

11.7 hrs

8.9 hrs

8.0 hrs

7.15 hrs <- predicted with the battery at 59%

So the "Usage" time vs battery percent appears to be non-linear and drops faster and faster as the Usage time increases.

I'm charging it back to 100% now. It will be interesting to see what happens on the train today.

doug

Well, the restore as a new phone and then restore from my encrypted backup didn't help, like it did when I changed from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 5.

Again, the "predicted total useage time" (based on the battery percent and the Settings > General > Usage time kept going down over time on cellular - but even more dramatically than over wi-fi:

6.7 hrs

4.2 hrs

3.5 hrs

3.6 hrs

3.1 hrs

It's obvious where the energy is going. When on cellular (LTE - full strength almost the whole time), even when not using the phone, it gets quite warm. The energy is being dissipated as heat.

It surely must be an issue with the carrier and the iPhone. I'm going to call the carrier support tomorrow. Here in Japan they provide the technical support for the iPhone anyway. It should get this warm or have the battery deplete so quickly over cellular.

doug

And in the 6 hours since I've gotten home, the iPhone 5 is running cool as a cucumber on my wi-fi without dropping nary a percent.

Obvious some issue with the carrier. It shoudln't get that warm just sitting there, even when not being used.

doug

I just discovered this thread. Forgive me for not reading all 103 pages, but is this a new problem related to iOS 7.0.4? Reason I ask is that my battery life was fine until recently. I can't quite identify what changed it, but about a week ago it got bad, to where I'm in the red by 12 noon. It used to last through the day—and I didn't have to turn off location services or background refresh or notifications or any of that.

I was thinking I might have installed an app that hogs location services or something like that, but then I saw that a lot of other people are having this issue, so hopefully an iOS update will solve the problem?

Doug it's not the carrier we are all on different carriers and not everyone on any particular carrier is effected.

Restoring from a backup will NOT work. Set up as new iPhone and manually add everything back from iTunes. Nothing else will work for you.

Alien47 wrote:

Doug it's not the carrier we are all on different carriers and not everyone on any particular carrier is effected.

Restoring from a backup will NOT work. Set up as new iPhone and manually add everything back from iTunes. Nothing else will work for you.

I called AU technical support this morning. They handle technical support for the iPhones they sell. They said my procedure was ok. They really think the problem might be with the radio or whatever the gizmo is that handles the cell signals.

Before trying your suggestion - which would take a very long time - I am trying one more experiment today, which is to leave it off wi-fi and just on cell usage. But I'm not going anywhere today. I want to see if somebody's theory that the constant changing of cell tower connections contributed to the drain. I don't know why that would be case though. Otherwise, the AU person said I should bring it into my neighborhood AU shop to be looked at.

But let me ask you this - why do you think manually adding everything back from iTunes (or rather the App store I presume you meant, right?) would make any difference?

Thanks,

doug

Won't be any effect if setting up a new phone - tried - useless!

Doug,

i forgot exactly how long it took but something like 2-3 hours. You do it from itunes. i.e go through your list of apps in itunes and check the ones you want to add back on the phone. Same with songs from memory, or just tick them all. Then when you click sync it downloads them from the apple store for you. You dont have to wade through the store or anything trying to find your apps to download, just tick the ones you want from the list in your itunes and press sync.

This works, as unlike restoring from backup which uses a previous copy of everything on your phone (code glitches and all) restoring from your itunes account gets you fresh uncroupted content from the apple app and music stores.

The problem is a software glitch on your phone. Restoring from backup just puts the glitch back on your phone.

b.Leev did you set up as a new Phone and then restore from backup?

Alien,

Why does it re-download apps that are already there stored in iTunes itself? Are you sure that's what happens?

Doug

Set up new phone!

Than manually added apps ets.

Doug the apps are not stored in itunes, all thats there is a record of what is in your account.

b.Leev,

I know 2 people now that had to do it twice. First time didnt stick, second time it worked. Try again and cross fingers.

Clean install as new phone

Writhin 10 minutes

92%

No apps installed

Well, in my latest test - turning off wi-fi but not taking the train on that long ride from one side to the other of Tokyo, the battery life fell, but not as dramatically. Instead of falling to a usage of 2.5-3 hrs, It averaged out to about 5.2 hrs of usage time over the day. Most notably, the iPhone did not get warm, like it did while traveling on the train.

Maybe there is something to the "constantly change cell antenna switching" theory that somebody had.

doug