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

Here's the image from yesterday.   1:15min after turning off wifi when it was at 87%

I was hoping for a screenshot of the battery life around 10%, curious to see what your total usage/standby would be

Sorry, but I rarely let it run down like that.   As I said yesterday, I use it with my Escort Radar decector using the Escort Live APP and when that's running, the screen is always on, BT is connected to both the detector and the car's handsfree system, and GPS is active with Apple Maps.   My one hour on the road would with all that running would put a huge dent in the battery life, so I keep it plugged in while driving.  

Maybe I'll toy around and leave it to drain this weekend.   If I do, I'll be sure to post it to your attention.

@JAmeson:

Have you experienced a very fast, full recharge? Last night mine was plugged in for only 15 minutes and went from 1% to 100% Today I am basically running nothing other than cellular data and nothing else and it's holding up much better. I just think it's sad that we have to power down like Apollo 13 in order to have decent battery life. We end up with something that's only slightly better than an old Motorola flip phone.

Hey guys... okay... the whole thing I said last night about the DNS working, only worked for a short while so that didn't solve the problem.  But I discovered something quite interesting.

I am very close to a cell phone tower.... so close that with my 4S I had 5 bars 95% of the time and 4 bars only 5% of the time.  With my iPhone 5 I am showing 4 bars 95% of the time and 5 bars only 5 percent of the time.  WHEN it is on 5 bars the battery does not drain as fast, but it is on 4 bars 95% of the time so most of the time it drains....

Ok, but it's a worse problem than that.  The bars never fluctuate.  If it is at 4 bars it will stay at 4 bars all day, until I turn off the phone and then it goes to 5 bars and then the rapid battery drainage stops.  So basically the phone will not recognize a full signal strength even if you are in range of one, until you power cycle your phone.  Once you move out of range of your tower it will drop down to lower bars and then not go back up again when you come back in range of your tower, unless you power cycle the phone.

What's odd about this is 1) obviously it shouldn't be doing this, 2) the power still drains if cellular is turned off, as it seems the phone is still trying to connect to the cellular tower regardless if you have cellular enabled or not, and 3) the bars/ or should I say what the software is interpreting as a lower than ideal signal even if available, is causing the battery to drain.  Anything other than 5 bars and the battery depletes at a rate of 1% every 2 minutes.

Run this test too.... keep your phone plugged into your charger until it gets to 100% with the plug icon.  If you have 5 bars showing and you unplug it it will stay at 100%.  If you have 4 bars or less showing it will automatically drop from 100% with the plug icon to 99%.  This is what is happening on my phone.

This could just be one of many problems we've all stated that is contributing to battery loss, but I was able to determine a direct correlation between the amount of bars showing to battery loss, over repeated tests and power cycles over the past 10 hours.

Nope.   Have never seen that.   Makes me wonder if your phone has some sort of battery meter calibration issue.

Herbie_K wrote:

 

@JAmeson:

Have you experienced a very fast, full recharge? Last night mine was plugged in for only 15 minutes and went from 1% to 100% Today I am basically running nothing other than cellular data and nothing else and it's holding up much better. I just think it's sad that we have to power down like Apollo 13 in order to have decent battery life. We end up with something that's only slightly better than an old Motorola flip phone.

I've had to turn off email notification. With so many responses my inbox is being slammed. Hmmm... maybe that's what's causing the drain?

What do you mean by this?  Are you in airplane mode?   I can turn off Cellular data and I can turn off LTE, but my 3G for calls is still operating with AT&T.    Airplane mode is the only way to shut down the cellular radio altogether.   At least for my AT&T i5

Bellatone wrote:

 

 

2) the power still drains if cellular is turned off, as it seems the phone is still trying to connect to the cellular tower regardless if you have cellular enabled or not,

Gen./settings/cellular/cellular data toggle

Oh I've tried all of that already, believe me.  I've spent 50 times as much time troubleshooting diagnostics on the phone then actually using it for leisure.

@bellatone

LOL x 1000

What Handsfull said.

The cellular data on/off button.  Yes, of course the phone is always in cellular because it is a phone after all, lol, and if I couldn't receive phone calls then I might as well have an iPod Touch but I mean with regards to the cellular data on off option... and it is regardless of whether or not roaming voice, roaming data, or international CDMA are on or off.

And I should note that yesterday when I posted that my Sprint page was reporting I had used 145GB of data I was mistaken.  It said 145,380KB which is 145MB.  But even so, I have not used 145MB of data on cellular.  I have only used Wi-Fi for data transfer since I've had the phone, except for the occasional text or e-mail which would be a few MB at most.

That only shuts down cellular data.   The cellular radio will remain on and calls will come through.......

Handsfull wrote:

 

Gen./settings/cellular/cellular data toggle

Well **** me!!  Double **** me!! My phone dropped to 4 bars now and it has been at 100% for the past 1.5 hours.  I'm done trying to troubleshoot this **** thing.  None of it makes any sense and there is no rhyme or reason to why the battery dies so fast.

But I did do what someone else said above by switching iCloud push to manual, and I deleted the Skype app, so maybe that helped, but that was only 15 minutes ago so it still would have been at 100% for the past 1.25 hours.

None of this makes any sense at all.

And Bluetooth is on, and I've made a few small cell calls and one text.

I will say though that since changing all my Wi-Fi connection points' DNS numbers to 8.8.8.8 that I am getting much faster Wi-Fi access.  So at least that helped in some regard.

I feel like watching Tim Cook, Bob Mansfield, Scott Forstall, and Phil Schiller do a Three Stooges routine until they are all seeing stars.

Ok, this is truly bizzarre.  My phone has shown 100% with bluetooth on now for the past 2 hours.  It has never done this before.  What the **** is going on?  Did Apple slip us some kind of secret update?