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

same battery issues here.it seems bizarre to me that the best smartphone out there needs to shut off al it's functions that make it better than the rest,in order to work decent!!!my girlfriend has my 2 year old iphone 4 now and it beats my battery without even trying.i'm losing 1% of battery per 1-2 minutes of use.i'm prepared to give apple the benefit of the doubt until their first ios6 update to fix it but if not then it's a disgrace!700euro phone needs to work;and dont tell me they did not know this problem existed.it's very hard to believe that the world's biggest company doesn't know what quality control is!!!! call me crazy but this crap would not have happened if mr jobs was still here!!!!

do you have cellular data switched off? or on?

Jameson:

Turn your wifi off and see what your results are.  Ill bet they aren't even close to what your currently getting.

Exactly. Wifi doesn't seem to be the issue. I get very good battery life with wifi. Once I use cellular data its a whole other story.

Cellular Data ON

Your cellular data can be on, but if you're on Wi-Fi,  cellular data will never be used.

Turn off your Wi-Fi, and let us know what the results are five hours from now

As I said many times before, I spend a lot of my day on Wifi, bith in the office and at home.   I was at 98% when I left the office for lunch and used the phone a lot, mostly to keep up with this thread using Safari, along with email for an hour.   When I got back from lunch it was at 90%, so I lost ~~8% in that hour of decent usage with NO wifi.   While driving, I was also connected to the car's BT system for maybe 15min total.

Very little usage since lunch, I'm at

87%

1:31 usage

7:13 standby

I have little doubt that lot's of wifi time helps, but others have complained that it makes little or no difference to their situation.   If anyone needs additional info, let me know.   I'm just trying to help find a way to uncover the answrs.

OK.   Wifi off at 2:16pm EDT with 87% battery remaining.   I'm only here for another 90min, so I'll report back just before 4pm EDT.

During my commute, I have the phone attached to my Escort radar detector via BT, with GPS maps running Escort Live, so I will have it plugged into the car charger.   That combination of the screen always on, Escort Live running, GPS running, and BT connections to BOTH the radar detector and the car handsfree system, would kill a RAZR MAXX!!!!

Stay Tuned.

Jameson:

Eating popcorn waiting for results.....

Alwayslookn:

I feel your pain.  Verify you have BT tuned off as that was a killer for me.  Either way, the phone is a failure...so try to get a 4s with iOS 5 on it like I'm trying to do now. A very good friend of mine just called me today and left a voicemail saying he wants to get his wife her first iPhone.  He doesn't know what's happening with this whole ordeal, but after careful consideration, I told him to get an iPhone 4S, because I KNOW that model doesn't haw a hardware failure....the iPhone 5....I can't rule it out.

I don't understand how Apple can brag about size and weight, yet the tradeoff seems to be crappy battery life. I've tried just about everything listed here, BT off, wifi off, cellular data off, pushes off, and if I walk away for a few minutes it goes down four or five percent. Yesterday, after an overnight charge, I had 55 minutes of call usage, an hour of Pandora playing over wifi and 60 MB of cellular data and it was completely dead by 8:00PM. My two year old iPhone 4 kicks it's butt with greater usage.

Something is not right here!

@hands urgh just not right. The problem is my friend has an iPhone 4 with ios6 and since the day she installed it, the phone is doing what ours is doing... So I just don't know

Honestly maybe i don't even know what bad battery life is. Maybe I'm expecting too much.

This is where I'm at currently: tiny bit of Facebook(like 2 mins) tiny bit of twitter(2 mins), tiny bit of music(3 mins) 2 min phone call... Screen almost all the way down, Siri off, location off, lte was on for like 10 mins, wifi was on for a few mins, now I'm on 4g

Usage: 1 hour 47 mins

Standby: 2 hours 58 mins

81% battery

@always: I have it on my old 4 that's now just an iPod Touch, and it goes for days with barely a drop in battery life. Of course, it's not using cellular so maybe that's the culprit???

This issue is Cellular data. The majority of people here claim the drops coincide with cellular use.

The new radios must have a bug in software or hardware.

Heating up checking email on HSPA not Wifi is proof enough go me.

I know it's only been 1:15 min with wifi off, but I figured I'd get this up and posted before I left for the day.   Lost 3% in that time, with one very short phone call.   3 Bars of LTE here in the office.   I'm still happy.........