iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

Just got off the phone with AppleCare Support. They don't have anything documented showing this is a "trending" issue - so I would say definitely call in to just report it if you can. I've tried everything at this point, currently going through a restore to see if that does anything for me. If not, I was told to just take it to an Apple Store (or, if I wasn't close to one, they would've set up a repair over the phone to send it in) and have it swapped out. I'm thinking this is more of an iOS6 issue than an actual battery issue though...

I found a thing that make a lot of difference for me.

It seems that the GPS doesnt turn off by itself. And that the gps is draining a lot of juice!

charged it and turned off the GPS and it took 2h before it drop to 99%..

played for 2 minutes with MAPS app and drop to 95% ..

There is something there for sure!

The first 1% always take a bit longer to drop.

my thought on this is, its to do with reception/antenna issue.

my iphone 5 is very often showing two bars reception and then jumping to full and after awhile back to two.

I reckon the phone is constantly hunting for signals behind the screen and thats why it drains the battery like crazy. When I turn on airplane mode the battery issue seems to go away.

Any thoughts?

Restore completed. For now, seems to be a lot better. Just did a regular restore from backup. I was at least able to type this whole message without losing a percentage! Just a note - I close all applications (double tap home, hold and then "x" out) so that wasn't part of my battery draining issue. Definitely recommend a restore (back up first though!) to anyone having problems.

same problem happening here in Singapore's stock of iphone 5.

my iphone 5 was flat for less than 12 hours, yesterday.

and since it did not detect LTE signal yet, i turned it off this morning, so that it will not hunt for LTE signal and use up the battery. i also tried turning off all applications when not in use.

However, the battery is still draining....

paid so much for this iphone 5... n there are still long long Q outside the telco shops waiting to buy the phone....

Apple, pls don't disappoint yr customers...

Hello t.katz,

How's your phone status? I'm a bit concerned of your method. I really did follow your way.

It's charging righte now and wait for it to full-charge 100%.

Pls let me know.

Thanks!

Hey st4lker,

So far so good, actually. I took the phone off the charger just under 13 and a half hours ago and my battery is at 80% now.

I did notice that it was initially at 100% for quite a while and then it started to drop, but slowly. I forget at what time, but at some point I did turn off LTE (since I dont have service in my area), but I don't think that actually changed the speed of the drain (or not enough to really be noticeable).

I've only been using the phone lightly, but the other night I hadn't used it at all and in 10 hours it had dropped to 43%... so its definitely improved at this point.

As someone else had pointed out, I did notice that some apps that use the GPS don't seem to turn it off right away (I've been manually killing apps when I see gps still running at the home screen), so that may also be something to look for.

Hope some of this helps!

So what you did was backup first, then restore to factory settings, then restoring the backup again? If that is correct, I shall try it too! The battery is dropping quite fast right now :(

You have to enter DFU mode to restore it from iCloud as t.katz mentioned.

How do you do that? (Sorry, not very experienced in iPhone)

Hey Blackout,

What I did was forced a backup through iTunes (connected via the usb cable), and then put the phone into DFU mode and did a restore. Then I went through the usual iTunes process to restore my backup to the phone. Doing the restore via iCloud should work as well, I just find it much faster to restore via the iTunes backup then over WiFi. I like to keep local backups in iTunes anyway..

I don't know if entering DFU mode vs just doing a straight restore actually makes a difference, its just something I got used to do doing. Whenever it seemed like my phones battery was draining fast, or things were acting weird I would always DFU restore and that would seem to make the issues go away. It could simply be psychological giving the feeling of doing a "format + install" vs simply a "reinstall" type thing, I have no idea at this point 😝

As for entering DFU mode, I'm not sure if thats something Apple likes discussed on these forums? Just incase, if you do a google search... oh, say perhaps "iphone restore dfu", you might just find your answer in the first result (iClarified).

Hope this helps.

Thanks a lot, will try your method too! :)

Good luck!

Hi. Sorry to appear dumb, but what is a DFU restore and how do you do it? I know how to do a regular restore but haven't heard if that, and after losing 97% power over 4 hours in London yesterday (using maps & google & camera) I'm desperately worried Ive replaced my beloved iphone4 with a lemon!!!

Hi katcam,

Pls see below link;

http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1034

hope it will help you enter DFU mode.

DFU mode is very effective way to solve most of the issues on iphone.