Q: iPhone 5 battery life is way worse than iPhone 4

OK.  Just talked to apple support.  Very nice guy.  He agreed that there is some real issue if my replacement phone is performing as badly as the one i took in.  Suggested I go back to the store and have them run diagnostics on the same phone.  Did NOT suggest they have been getting a lot of calls on the issue.

Thus, I urge all of you to call and at least get this into the ecosystem.  When I told him I was reading a thread on apple's own support site which was at 82 pages, he seemed genuinely astonished.

for what it's worth...

@ turbo

I agree with you.  But I must take Issue with your assessment of whether it's hardware related or not.  If my new phone was performing like my  4S, I would say its not hardware related.... But it isn't.  It's performing "better" than my first phone THAT I RESTORED TO A BACKUP, but not to an acceptable standard such as Jameson's.  This is my reasoning for saying it indeed is a hardware failure, Because after you restore to a backup, you cannot get your phone to run like a new phone can direct from Apple.... Regardless of how many times you restore (yea, even DFU) or set up as new phone.   No one on this forum has been able to get numbers like mine after they've restored their phone from a back up.

.....and my 'numbers' still sukk.  I'm currently at 29% 3.20 usage and 15 standby = garbage.

Handsful

At the risk of beating a dead horse.

I did not restore from a backup.  I set mine up as a new phone and my performance is awful.  Right now:  83% and I have yet to make a telephone call or even use safari today.  All I have done is read emails, none sent.  No texting. 

1 hour 5 minutes of usage    3 hours 57 minutes standby.

Phil:

That's consistent with numbers I just posted. 

First of all, I agree with the fact that many people have the same problem but, for various reasons, don't post on this page. Take me as an example, I have the same battery issue as everyone here but since I didn't have anything more to add to the information I preferred not to post up until now.

Second, after going through almost all the comments and performing a DFU restore, the battery problem still existed. But one issue was clearly solved with the restore and that was strangely high usage that the iPhone used to show even when it was locked. But as for the battery issue, no luck.

So I went to the apple store and got my replacement just an hour ago. Its too soon to comment on the result but it seems that the problem still remains. It's using 1% every two minutes just as the last one did. I would update the status after a couple of charging cycles if I see considerable improvement.

For your information I'm in Switzerland and on Orange CH.

I completely agree with you as well its very easy to believe that with millions of iP5s being pushed out theres bound to be some lemons and you could just be very unlucky with getting two of them... but I've read countless posts of people going through 4 or 5 phones, restoring new/backup, troubleshooting and disabling things and they still have the same issue. So there must some outside factor like the area you live/work in or something else I haven't picked up on yet. It could be you have good signal but there are too many people on 1 cell tower or it has problems picking out a stronger signal. Either way there should not be an issue when in the past 4/4S do not show the same issues. When I first had problems I called ATT and they said they were working on 10 towers in my area and in the end I ended up getting LTE with a little better battery life but still not what was advertised or what I see here from users with "good" usage times.

Another thing I did was purchase a nano SIM adapter so I could use my iP4 (set up the same way) and compared usage apples for apples and the 4 did get better usage times while not drastic it was still an hour and a half more usage (on a two year old phone) that prevented me from needing to scramble to charge it while out and about. All and all I feel for all you guys here and like people have been saying if you havent called apple yet CALL THEM they need to hear it from each and every one of us having this issue. Even people who dont care to post here and are just following CALL THEM and let them know there IS an issue and that they need to look into / fix / address this problem.

Just posting this in case I havent in this thread:

iPhone 5 - ATT 16GB White.

-LTE Off (not available)..

-In a 2G only area for 11 hours of that time period.

-WiFi always On

-BT off

Phone Set Up As New now, after originally setting up from backup.

Usage: 7 hours 55 min 19 seconds, Standby 1 Day 5 hours before dying (35:35:33) to be exact.

I consistently get over 24 hours of standby. I still feel iMessage drains a lot of the battery for no reason even when on WiFi.

For camera,

I noticed what you have gone through. What I have found that makes it "work" is if you touch where you want the camera to focus, ya know the "square" or "box", then take the picture with the flash. I neved had to do this on my iPhone 4 for dark photos to come out, but that fixes the issue for me.

Tim - you have to restore your phone as new and not install the latest carrier updates, and never click into the About section on the iPhone or it will install the EE carrier settings

I have been running my iPhone 5 with TMobile 2G now for the past 4 days and I'm getting super battery and super standby

Hope that helps

New IPhone replacement....DRAINING BEFORE MY EYES.  I'm beyond right now.  I don't know what Jamesons settings are but I have to believe this is an ios6 problem... My friends with iphone 4s phones are having a massive change in the battery since it was installed... maybe its facebook? maybe its twitter? who knows! there are so many things it could be... I'm really just sorta at a loss for words... It has now been 3 weeks of dealing with this.  I rely on this phone for my daily needs.  The past 3 weeks I have spent a insane amount of time dealing with the actual phone dying, and then spending MORE time trying to figure out what the **** to do about it.  I am just going to let it be until October 16th ish and then get a full refund, as are my friends.  I'm not going to let them get away with this.  The only way I would keep this phone and not get a refund is if they guaranteed me IN WRITING that there is a known issue, they are fixing it, and I will be sent a brand new phone when it's sorted out.  BREATH IS NOT BEING HELD!

I figured it out!!! It's the, literally, 100's of email we get daily, almost by the minute from this thread:)

What is the difference between Iphone 5 with model numbers A1428 and A1429

@jameson - do you have A1429?

1428 is the GSM Canadian / US ATT model

1429 is the CDMA Verizon/Sprint and another 1429 GSM LTE ASIA

Reference

http://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/972158

I have the A1428

Status after quite a bit of usage on LTE during my lunch hour: