iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

I didn't want to go through all of the pages of posts to find this, but hopefully this will help some people out in determining if they have a battery problem or a calibration problem. I definitely don't doubt some users have bad batteries. My iPhone 5 (Black 64GB) was showing really rapid draining. To be honest, I really didn't believe it. I would unplug it in the morning and browse the web on Wi-Fi. I have LTE on and receive at least three bars everywhere in my house. Ten minutes of browsing would equal about 5% battery drain according to the meter.

I finally drained the battery on purpose yesterday to get it to calibrate. I got down to 5% remaining and decided to play a game to get it to shut down. Once I got down to 1%, it took about 40 minutes of gameplay to get it to shut down. I did a full charge and this morning the calibration seems much better. I've used the phone for one call of about 4 minutes, and I've browsed the web on Wi-Fi for about 30 minutes. It's been unplugged for over four hours now and I've only drained 2% of battery life.

My point is primarily that *some users may have no issue, and to charge a few cycles and to wear the battery all the way down will cause your phone to better calibrate to where your battery really is at.

My settings do affect my battery life, and they should be noted. I only check mail manually. I don't want to know every single time a message comes in. It drives me insane. For everything else that offers push notifications, it's on.

Personal hotspot kills my iPhone 5 in less than 30-35 minutes, browsing the internet takes away 4-5% every ten minutes or so....

2y old iPhone 4 manages 3 times as long times .........

I think need to take a trip to Apple

Standby

I've tried it both ways and neither way is helping much. I even did it in DFU mode

try it again LOL

try this...

drain you battery up to 10%

open itunes......

hit restore ....

set up as new iphone..after that you could use your old back up

put any setting you want..

let it charge through your computer untill it full

i don't use siri.....maps on...fb on....fetch mail...and most of notification is on

i guess charging through my computer fix the problem, i compare this with my iphone 4. it took the same amount of time to make it full, unlike the wall charger it took faster than usual.i'm gonna try with my wall charger after my battery drain....

I am fortunate that I'm not having these issues.

Yesterday my phone was at 42% after 16 hrs. It's now been 6 hrs and it's at 80%. My wifes phone seems to be doing great as well and we did a restore using our old phones and this hasn't affected the performance.

to follow up on my posts from earlier this week:

- i swapped out my phone at an apple store last night

- there was 60% battery life out of the box

- during the 20 minute drive home with the phone on 4g/LTE the battery remained at 60% and the phone was not hot

- i immediately plugged the phone into the charger once home and restored from iCloud backup

- at 10:15 am this morning i unplugged the phone and launched the twitter, instagram, and camera apps and refreshed my feeds once

- it is 1:30 pm and my battery is at 92%

so far, it appears that the power usage and heat issues i had with my previous iphone 5 do not exist on the new one and power usage is at or near what it was with iOS6 on my iPhone 4 with all settings the same.

I stumbled upon this post as my new iPhone 5 seems to be dropping much quicker than my 4. Also noticed that it charges up in less than an hour which is strange as it's new. Generally it takes a lot longer to charge up a battery with a larger capacity. It takes my iPhone 4 over an hour to charge up and it's two years old and very well used. Real shame! Looks like I'm going to have to buy a £30 cable to take to work to charge it! Samsung niggling in the background for next year... These things are not cheap!

Thank you for your detailed description of the 11 steps and the DFU restore as a new phone. I'm on 4s upgraded to ios6 but experiencing every single word of the previous pages of this forum. I've seen your post on the 23rd and acted immediately upon it. It's the fifth day now and I'm getting a very much improved battery drain. Almost like before the upgrade. I'm a Medical Doctor with a huge hobby in electronics. Since I'm still on my 4s, I'd agree with you that it's a software problem and that apple would not respond to it quite soon - save face as you mentioned. I'm expecting my iPhone 5 soon. So I guess I'll be ready to adjust it. THANK YOU, YOUR POST REALLY SOLVED MY PROBLEM.

A couple of things......

1. Your iPhone 5 will not have as good battery life as your 4 did. It is better than the 4s, however.

2. From nearly dead, I have never had an iPhone fully charge in less than an hour. Doesn't sound right.

All of that being said, if you are a moderate user and either on wifi, or connected to a STROG cellular signal, there is no reason that you should not last a full day with the I-5. Heavy users will have to charge up before day's end, unless you spend a lot of time turning features on and off as you use them. I don't have the patience for that.........

ElektroOrganik wrote:

I stumbled upon this post as my new iPhone 5 seems to be dropping much quicker than my 4. Also noticed that it charges up in less than an hour which is strange as it's new. Generally it takes a lot longer to charge up a battery with a larger capacity. It takes my iPhone 4 over an hour to charge up and it's two years old and very well used. Real shame! Looks like I'm going to have to buy a £30 cable to take to work to charge it! Samsung niggling in the background for next year... These things are not cheap!

usage today..

No Wifi

No LTE

No Bluetooth

No iCloud Sync

Auto DIM brightness ON

(This was a fresh setup on this phone, i did not restore)

battery still *****....

so with no bluetooth enabled, standby at least works and helps extend battery.. but regular light usage still drains the device like crazy.

with bluetooth enabled, device drains battery as fast in standby as out of standby

edit:

My experience from yesterday was that Bluetooth whether in use or not (but turned on), is a huge battery drain.. 1% every 2-3 minutes

Bluetooth code needs to be patched, as this is supposed to be Bluetooth 4.0 (Supposed to be lower energy [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluetooth_low_energy])

Recap of my experience:

I had done the Reset All Settings, Reset Network Settings, delete all email accounts, and the battery drain/charge cures. I have not done a DFU reset. After a second battery drain/recharge cycle I discovered 6 hours of usage(!) by the phone when it was left sitting overnight (I didn't touch it for more than 5 minutes during that time).

Update:

I killed every app that was running, recharged to 100% and went about my day. Seemed like battery life was much improved. The second day after also resulted in reasonable battery life, still not awesome battery life but nowhere near the draining of the first couple of days of owning the phone. It seems like I'm getting 8-10 hours of usage (if I went to 0%). Haven't seen the phantom background usage I did that one night but I'm monitoring usage to see if it returns and I can identify the app responsible.

It does seem like 4G/LTE usage takes a lot of juice and causes the phone to get warm. I can still almost watch the battery percentage drop when using cellular data (maybe 1% every 5 min or so). Unfortunately, I don't recall what my experiance was with 3G on the iPhone4 but it feels like it wasn't as bad as it is now.

As someone else posted, give your phone a week to calibrate the battery. Any battery issue is most likely a software issue, eg rogue apps and processes. Before any usage test, kill all running apps. iOS is supposed to shut down background apps but if an app uses location services there's a chance iOS will let it continue to run. Only GPS type apps and audio playing apps are supposed to be allowed to run indefinitely in the background but there's a chance the app is misrepresenting itself or iOS is administering the app incorrectly.

iOS 6.1 will probably solve a lot of the issues.

Same problem here. 100% at 8:00AM, 0% by 4:00 with normal usage. My 2+year old iPhone 4 lasted much longer. LTE is turned off (We don't even have LTE here yet). All apps have been shut off, and all of the other unnecessary things I can think of. Hoping it resolves itself soon!

I find GPS kills my battery, sometimes in only a few hours, had the same issue on iPhone 4 though.