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iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

I just got an iphone 5 and I restored a backup from my iPhone 4 so I have the same settings. But the iphone 5 drains way faster than my two year old very well used iPhone 4 which is running 5.1.1. Is it because of IOS 6? Just leaving it sitting overnight lost about half the battery. My iPhone 4 hardly uses any battery while it sits overnight.


Or do I have a bad battery on my new phone?

Posted on Sep 22, 2012 1:41 AM

Reply
3,614 replies

Jul 28, 2013 10:15 AM in response to holdrege

I have an iphone 5 and I cant seem to get it to last past 5 hrs usage.


Took it to Apple, they said this is normal. Turn all notifications off, location services, and do email every hour.

My question is then... why have a phone? if i can't have my email coming in? I could do this easily on a blackberry!!!!


My friends on the 4s have better battery life than I do. Any suggestions? would any of you suggest going back to the 4s?

Jul 28, 2013 5:45 PM in response to holdrege

Ive had my iphone5 for 8 months now and have never had it last longer than 6 hours.So for everyone concerened about poor battery life unfortunately this seems to be reality with this phone. I had had it swapped twice by apple and it hasn't made any difference.


it just doesn't seem to change whether you have certain things turned off or on--if so then only minimal difference and not worth the effort.


Something strange did happen the other day though--I changed my language setting from English to British English and my battery capacity went from 81% to 86%.


I don't know why the battery decided to give me back 5%--I have tried to replicate again with no success.


It seems to me there is some hardware calibration battery issue with all iphone5's and perhaps the only hope for resolution is when ios7 is launched next month.

Jul 28, 2013 7:20 PM in response to Jdawg24

I too have had the iP5 since launch day and have had mixed results as far as battery life goes. After following this thread and several others I've come to the basic conclusion that 6 hours is about the norm for most users. Clearly the phone is capable of more as stated by Apple,( using VERY specfic condtions), but also by several tech publications in their own tests. I think it's a situation of ever increasing hardware capibilty meeting the limitations current cellular technologies, I've noticed that alot of the complaints about extremely low battery life seem to be coming from Europe as well, so maybe there is a connection there? Hard to say.


I'm currently running iOS 7 beta 3 on my phone and I think there is a difference. I still get some varied performance, but the over all results point to better battery life in general. Overall my feeling is that there is a design flaw within the hardware architecture that the engineers were unable to completely overcome in iOS 6, but hopefully will have solved for the general release of iOS 7

Aug 2, 2013 8:11 PM in response to holdrege

I bought my iPhone 5 from future shop with the extended waranty the iphone's battery life was terrible, so I took it back, they did a simple test, played a video off YouTube for 10min, in 10min my battery drained more than 15%, so they gave me a new phone, if the phone would only drain 10% or less it would have pass the test, in my opinion if the battery drains more than 10% in 10minutes apple should replace the phone, before you do this test its recommended to erase the data of the phone

Aug 12, 2013 6:57 PM in response to holdrege

Had the same problem and was seriously bummed.I was losing about 1% power every 2-3 minutes and the phone was losing half charge overnight (about 25% with airplane mode on). Last night, I ran the battery all the way down until the phone turned off, and then re-charged. I used charge indicator in BatteryDoctor to make sure that I was at a full 100%. Today the phone's working great. I've been using it all day and it's still at 63%.

iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

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