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

Good point, thanks enchanted

Interesting battery results on anandtech's official IP5 review, which was apparently just posted today. Here's the link straight to the battery tests, scroll down to the 3G/LTE tests to see what I mean:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-review/13

Kind of surprising to me. I haven't been able to try LTE since it's not available on AT&T in my city, but their 3G numbers seem about on par with what I've been getting on 3G (and what I've seen in this thread). What was really interesting to me is that, with their tests, the 4.5 hours I've been seeing on 3G is on par with or better than many other phones.

Seems crazy, but I don't have any way of switching to LTE to test it. So... anyone out there getting amazing battery life on LTE-only?

My office is in an LTE area, so when I'm out and about in the area I do use it.   I see exactly what they are saying about the faster network allowing the unit to get back to idle quicker.   LTE absolutely flies.   It really does seem almost faster than wifi.   Pages that take 4-5 seconds to load with 3G will load seemingly instantaneously with LTE.   I can fully understand how this faster transfer will result in less "working" time and thus, longer battery life.

Henry Todd wrote:

 

Interesting battery results on anandtech's official IP5 review, which was apparently just posted today. Here's the link straight to the battery tests, scroll down to the 3G/LTE tests to see what I mean:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6330/the-iphone-5-review/13

 

Kind of surprising to me. I haven't been able to try LTE since it's not available on AT&T in my city, but their 3G numbers seem about on par with what I've been getting on 3G (and what I've seen in this thread). What was really interesting to me is that, with their tests, the 4.5 hours I've been seeing on 3G is on par with or better than many other phones.

 

Seems crazy, but I don't have any way of switching to LTE to test it. So... anyone out there getting amazing battery life on LTE-only?

Lots of great information in there and it shows that there are a tremendous number of variables, including some not mentioned  wihich can affect the life of the battery. 

The first sentence under 'Battery life Conclusions' is appalling. 

If a phones battery life is from 3 to 10 hours....it's time to get my Motorola star-tac out and fire it up.  What an absolute joke.  My 4s got a MINIMUM of 36 hours or standby ever since day one of ownership. 

Batt life at 30 percent now at 5:45 pm but I did not use it

However I used it for test call with a coworker for 10 minutes. i called his iphone 5 from my iphone 5

here are the results:

Call coworker iphone at 79% and mine at 36%

Test to ran for 10 minutes

Mine at 33% after 10 minutes and coworker at 77% after 10 minutes

However on mine the screen never turned off, but it was half lit up.

So taking that in consideration the extra 1 percent mine dropped does not seem that bad.

Its a joke for me, everytime when I'm on 3G (no LTE available here), my iPhones gets so extremly hot, battery drains really quickly - it immediately stops on WIFI - my phone is cooling down and battery draining stops. :///

I really do admire the Apple brand and I think they have incredibly bright people that are constantly working to design the products of tomorrow.  However, I strongly believe that Apple's desire to keep the lid on new products really hampers their ability to have user testing.  I don't know about others, but I would gladly spend an additional $300 on a phone if it had a battery that could last days (gosh, I would even settle taking a battery that could last my workday).  Here is what I have done with my phone and I get about 3-4 hours of active use (airplane mode enabled and disabled):

-I live in NYC and turn on airplane mode whenever I am entering the subway. 

-I have disabled LTE (which, ironically, is the major selling point of the phone). 

-I have turned off all notifications except for email, phone and text messages (which I get maybe 20 emails a day. 

-I have my email set to fetch every 15 minutes (I only have my iCloud account).

-I don't have anything syncing via cellular data.

-Bluetooth and wifi are disabled.

-Screen brightness is at about 10% (so I have to squint outside).

-Autobrightness is off.

-DND mode is enabled for 10 hours nightly.

-Location services are disabled except: cell network search, compass calibration and traffic

-Wifi iTunes sync is off

-Auto lock - 1 minute

-I've reset network settings

-Deleted Evernote (read someplace that it was corrupted)

-Turned off percentage meter because it's going to require I get medication from watching it.

-I've done several hard resets and did NOT restore from backup

-iCloud is only enabled for: mail, contacts, calendar, reminders and find my iPhone.  I do have back up to iCloud enabled.  I refuse to disable this as it is my only email address.

-I do not have Twitter and Facebook enabled.

In other words, I have disabled all of the features of the iPhone 5 so that I can be ensured to have a phone if I need one.  This is ridiculous.

I really like my iPhone 5.  I think it is a great phone.  I also thought that my iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS and iPhone 4 were all great phones.  For me, my battery issues started with iOS 5 when it was installed onto my iPhone 4.  I went from charging roughly every other day to needing a daily charge, usually twice daily.  iOS 6 initially didn't give me any problems, but lately, it's left me with a really cool looking version of a Nokia 5110. Trips to the Apple Store reveal that I am demanding too much out of my phone by expecting all of the features to work at once.  I've been told by the genius bar folks that I should disable push email and turn off iCloud... WHAAAT?

Guys

To confirm what we all suspected - and feared the most - this does seem (at least partially) a hardware issue with LOTS of iPhone 5's .. to give a bit of a background, the Sydney Apple store is only 5 min walk from where I work so I've made a point every week to go there and nag the **** out of the people at the genious bar till they offer me a replacement (to be honest it's not that hard, they give you that option really quickly), first 3 phones were useless, tried everything, restoring, updating, switching off everything etc (location, notification) setting as brand new, new account, not using iCloud etc (third one I made a point of NOT even opening the settings menu and NOT installing a single app, purely using it out of the box and manually typing my contacts numbers whenever I need to contact anybody.

4th phone is a different story altogether .. been using since Monday (it's Wednesday 11 am here now) and it FINALLY died and this is practically my first full cycle charge, been installing loads of apps and turning on everything (LTE, bluetooth, wireless you name it).

Keep in mind though this DOES NOT mean there's no software issue, its pretty obvious especially to all 4S owners that upgraded that IOS6 has a memory leak and hopefully this will be fixed in 6.1

In the meantime - if you could - try to replace your phone if you think it's defective, remember if you keep it long enough (1 year) then Apple will not replace it for you for free ..

I just home 30 minutes or so ago. In the way home 40 minutes or so battery lost about 8% or more. At home on wifi battery life is as good as my old 4.  So ya i think the 4G/LTE just eats battery life. I wish there was a way to have the wifi on after the iphone screen turns off. So after 2 days my my opinion is that wifi battery is fine but lte and 4g is not. What you guys experience has been ?

Moe:

Wait until your SECOND charge cycle to report your findings on battery usage/standby.   I did the EXACT same thing you did, where I got a brand new phone and I was getting 11 hours of usage on the first full charge (I posted the screenshot here in the thread).

Second charge I received the same numbers that my first phone produced.....which was (and still is) about 5 hours usage.

Let us know your next discharge numbers (from 100% to 10% without charging in-between, take a screenshot of the usage/standby screen).

Is there a way to have the iphone stay connected to wifi after screen is off  ? Meaning not connect to 4g/lte after screen is off.

I also think it is software related because while on the subway, I have airplane mode enabled.  I will use it for 30-45 minutes and when I get off the train it will show that I have 96% battery remaining.  Then, when I turn off airplane mode, the battery drops down to 87-91%

Re-posting this again.  There a lot of good info here

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6324/the-iphone-5-performance-preview

Plus

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/reviews/entry/apple-iphone-5-16gb-32gb-64gb/P7

http://www.macworld.com/article/2010535/lab-tests-how-long-does-the-iphone-5s-ba ttery-last.html

http://www.apple.com/iphone/battery.html

Bottom line is that 6-8 hours is normal and in line with what Apple and tech sites are reporting. There are so many variables with cell technologies that its not surprising to me that people all using the same phone and OS are experiencing such wide differences.

Apple can't perform public tests on an unreleased product after all, and is dependent on logs and feedback from actual field usage to fully optimize the OS. This was the case with the 4S and I'm sure it is true here too.  Hopefully it won't be too long before an update is released(23rd maybe?)

In the meantime, I think everyone should take a step back and enjoy the phone.

Just my two cents

That is great... but I am losing battery at a rapid rate... in AIRPLANE mode.