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

Hi Bellatone

Just for kicks I restored my 2nd phone (yes replacement from Apple, still has the same problem with battery, will get a third one on Monday since the store is so close) I restored it as DFU, blank from scratch, charged to 100% (before the restore i had drained to 0% several times in the past few days) and installed only one free game to test .. what i noticed is that it stays as 100% for quite a while - got my hopes up - then its falling again rapidly, 86% after 57 minutes of using and 2 hours of standby, i havent changed any single setting from the out-of-the-box standard settings that come with a fresh installation of IOS6 .. id love to hear from the folks at the apple store that "the quick battery drainage is due to all the apps & notifications i have open" .. so its not installed apps from what I can tell, probably still is either hardware or software or both ..

Mind you if the 3rd replacement doesnt fix it in one week / or Apple dont generate a software patch or act on this, Im switching to Samsung, frankly speaking im not going to spend my life worrying about why a product isnt working .. that's their problem

Update from my earlier usage post. After the phone went to 1%, it let me continue using it for about 30 more minutes and never shut down. Then, I plugged it in for 15 minutes to the low amp charger. When I left for dinner and unplugged it, the battery meter registered 100%! WHAT THE HECK IS UP WITH THAT?

There is no way it could have fully charged in 15 minutes. Now four hours later, with very little use, it is down to 30%. I am beginning to think it might be a software issue, or it could just be a crappy battery that charges and discharges quickly. Anyone else experience the super-fast full charge?

Tonight I will charge it all night, and tomorrow I will turn off all possible sources of drainage: Siri. Blutooth, Wi-fi, cellular data, and see how fast it begins to drop.

Let's just say, I'm not confident...

Update

Home now

Battery is at 19%

4 hours 25 minutes usage

14 hours 11 minutes standby

Yes, my iPhone 5 appears to charge "super fast," as well.  It can go from 28 to 100% in about 10 minutes.  I just thought it was the effect of the new Lightning cord.  But, it does seem strange.

PHIL:

Your numbers are no good brother.  Time for another new phone....it's the only way to get the point across to Apple, I'll be returning mine once every week until I get one that works!  

MY iphone5 battery lost 3-5% in about 7 hours overnight. That may not seem like a lot to many who are losing a lot more, but with the same settings, my iPhone 4 lost nothing. I'd worked very hard to get the settings just right on my iPhone 4, because it was originally losing a lot. The only difference in the iPhone 5 is Siri and the LTE network. Being that I had cellular services turned off, I can only narrow it down to Siri or to the fact that some open apps are draining the battery again. Maybe the updates need to be in some of the apps, but as I stated in another post, I've been closing any data-driven apps and, though I keep Mail open, my settings are set to Fetch once an hour. With my iPhone 4, the battery did not draw down with the very same settings.

I, too have many more than 100 apps. I'm just saying, I make sure to close out any that are open and data-driven... Safari, for example. Even Facebook, at one time, was a huge drain on the battery in iOS 5. A FB update corrected the problem, but I still close it out from the dock before leaving the phone asleep for the night. I'm thinking that of the few apps I leave open, perhaps there's a drain that needs to be fixed.  Next, I think I'll close all apps out and and re-open them one at a time. If that isolates the problem, I'm still not sure if the fault would be with iOS 6 or, perhaps, with the particular app.

Okay.  Great news to share with everyone.  Someone mentioned earlier in a post to change the Wi-Fi DNS settings from 192.168.1.1 to 8.8.8.8

This actually works incredibly well.  This is the first time since I've owned my iPhone 5 that my battery has stayed at 100% for 25 minutes after unplugging it from the charger.  Normally by now it would be down to 91 or even 88%, Yet it's still at 100%.  I am truly quite impressed.

Unfortunately, this means that every Wi-Fi network you join you will have to manually alter.  But since this does work, now Apple may have a better idea of where to head to fix the problem.  There was one other person that says this did not work for them, from what I remember, but it definitely is working for me.  I am just hoping of course, that my battery life doesn't suddenly plummet to 80% all in one shot.  For the moment, it's working great and still says 100% after about half an hour.

Not only that, my Wi-Fi has been much faster and hasn't failed to connect to any website, have any problems sending text messages, or having any problems sending emails.  In addition, I've used the dictation feature this whole time except to make a few manual type corrections to this post.

This is the biggest breakthrough yet discovered to solve battery issues and I applaud the person who discovered them earlier.

Okay, it just now dropped to 99% after about 32 minutes.  I will also say that I'm not sure if this worked earlier when I tried it at my office on that Wi-Fi network.  Usually at work I keep the phone plugged in and fully charged, so I can't say whether or not it worked on that network.  At work, we have AT&T U–verse with static IPs.  At home, I have Time Warner Roadrunner with a dynamic IP.  The person who originally made this suggestion also suggested trying 8.8.4.4 if 8.8.8.8 didn't work.

These shorter numbers seem to have something to do with the way the new Mac operating system works with routing.  I don't understand it myself, but I can say it is working on my iPhone now.  I am still at 99% and it's been about 40 minutes total. Correction, it just dropped to 98% which is still phenomenal considering by now it would probably be around 77%.

Note:  Dictation isn't working properly. It is capitalizing letters after a pause in speech and not just after a period.

This is quite exciting, coming from someone who was about ready to toss my phone out the window.

Try it and report back.  Still holding firm at 98%.

Ok, 7 minutes later now and only dropped 1 more percent and I might also add my brightness is around 70-75%.

Looking good!!

@bella

Not to kill your thunder.....but not having an issue with WIFI at all....in fact, at home on WIFI, my usage actually decreases versus being on Cell data.

My usage was always better on cellular than WiFi.  But it still sucked.  I'm only at 94% now after an hour at 75% brightness which I just lowered to 40% to see if that prolongs it more.

For me, this is terrific.  At this rate the phone would easily give me the ten hours of WiFi usage.  I use WiFi 98% of the time anyway and cellular only about 2%.

I understand where you are coming from.  And you maybe right in some instances.  However, I was just saying that my replaced(new) iPhone doesn't have any apps other than stock apps and it's losing battery fast while my iPhone 4 and 4S running iOS 6 with hundreds of apps installed.  So, while some apps might cause excessive battery drainage, there's other problems here that is causing the mayhem.

Phyllis Sommers wrote:

 

I, too have many more than 100 apps. I'm just saying, I make sure to close out any that are open and data-driven... Safari, for example. Even Facebook, at one time, was a huge drain on the battery in iOS 5. A FB update corrected the problem, but I still close it out from the dock before leaving the phone asleep for the night. I'm thinking that of the few apps I leave open, perhaps there's a drain that needs to be fixed.  Next, I think I'll close all apps out and and re-open them one at a time. If that isolates the problem, I'm still not sure if the fault would be with iOS 6 or, perhaps, with the particular app.

I'm now thinking this might be a DNS problem within the OS, some being affected on cellular and some on WiFi.  The towers must use a DNS too I'd imagine to connect to the internet.  If this is what's causing it it shouldn't be a difficult fix for Apple.

The 192.168.1.1 DNS server is just a setting to use your local ISP DNS servers. 8.8.8.4 and 8.8.8.8 are Google's DNS servers. This just means that your local ISP is a tad slower than google in resolving website addresses, while some ISP's may be quicker. It would also mean you local ISP is probllematic if getting failed page loads if the Google DNS is fixing that. This is not an iphone issue, but a local DNS issue.

as for battery life, i suppose it could aid in your battery life as it would mean less time searching for the address, but doubtful it would do too much.

And as others have stated, using wifi actually improves battery life. my battery life with wifi at home gives me 8-9+ hours of usage. Whereas using LTE/3G im getting 3-4 hours, sometimes 5 hours usage.

You may very well be right. A lot of people are complaining about much worse battery drainage than I'm experiencing. I do remember reading somewhere that keeping Settings open is a big drain. I'm wondering about Mail, as well, even if settings are set to fetch minimally. Just for troubleshooting purposes, I'm going to try to close all apps tonight and see what happens. It frustrates me to be losing any battery when idle, being that there was no loss on my iPhone 4, using the very same settings. It seems as though a number of people are having pretty severe battery drainage, however, so I'm counting myself among the luckier ones. Clearly, though, Apple still can't get the battery issues right. I've always felt it was a software issue, however, more so than hardware. The DNS discussion above is interesting, too. There's definitely something not meshing properly. It would be great if it is isolated to the DNS settings. I'm going to be at the Apple Store tomorrow, for a different reason. I'm curious to hear what they'll have to say about this entire issue.