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

As others have said; look at the thread title.  My 5 has been significantly worse than my 4, even compared to the four after 2 years when the battery had decreased dramatically in how long it lasted. 

Last night, I asked my wife if she wanted to plug in her phone (4gS); she said "I don't need to".  She didn't need to because her phone doesn't die at 11am on the second day after charging - and she uses hers more than I do...

I had the 3g and 4g before buying the 5 and was quite happy with the battery life on those.

Yes Keja, I have owned i3gs, i4 and i4s models, before this one.   I never said the the battery is as good or better than those previous models.   I said the phone is more power hungry and the battery is rated essentially the same capacity.   Logic dictates that it cannot possibly last as long as previous phones.  

What I also said is that given the design is what it is and the super feature set the phone has, over previous versions, I AM happy enough with the phone, since I easily get a full day's use out of it and simply charge it while sleeping.   Forgetting the marketing hype, which simply is not realistic, what do you expect to happen now?   APPLE is certainly not going to offer refunds on 10's of millions of phones.   IMHO, even as released, the i5 is still the best phone and iOS is the best OS available today.  

For those of you who feel that 2-9 day battery life is of primary importance, there are other options out there that will get you what you are after.   Hopefully, the shortcomings of the droid, windows RT or the blackberry OS won't set you into a frenzy over that!   Be careful what you wish for.......

Well you know not everyone lives in the city, there are times when is totally reasonable to expect 2 FULL days of working not 1 day. For how much these phone cost and how many Billions Apple has made is totally Unaacceptable to put out such a product.

As i think about this i need to start a thread how much worst battery life of ios 6.0.1 is compared to 6

Go for it!   I'm guessing you'll be pretty lonely in that thread though.....

BTW...

http://m.nbcnews.com/technology/gadgetbox/how-does-iphone-5-battery-life-stack-1 B6102050

This is just getting ridiculous.  2 Days? Ok... That's my cue.

I just want the phone to last 5-6 hours on 4g. I want it to remain stable in standby and not drain.  That's it.

To those who are expecting to use their phones for 2 days.  It's just not going to happen.

If you have success with ios 6.0.1 improving your battery life... cheer this thread up a bit!

Good luck to all. 

-Jameson thanks for staying the voice of reason Lol!!

Here's an interesting article, particularly in regards to iPhone

http://m.cnet.com/news/tech-breakthrough-may-double-smartphone-life/57543673

With iOS6 I had configured my phone to a point where I believed the battery life I was getting was acceptable (with iCloud, Location Services being mostly on) . I would max out at about just over 7 hours usage a day.

I logged some actual battery drainage data and created the chart below (scaled up my per min usage's I didn't actually sit there maxing my LTE usage for an hour ):

To summrise I was getting 1% per hour at best!

I believe iOS 6.0.1 has brought some major improvements to battery life improvements especially for LTE idle drainage, which is very similar to 3G now. Furthermore I've seen a significant improvement in LTE drain on the internet as well. I need a few more days of loggin the data but I really think iOS 6.0.1 has not only fixed a few bugs but also brought about battery drainage improvements during use!

You must be lukcy as ios 6.0.1 has been worst for me...I am currently downloading ios 6.0.1 full version and ill do a full restore see if that helps.

on my soon to be third iphone 5 now..... Aside from the scratches that arrived with my phone while in the box (can't believe this is still hapenning btw, talk about disappointing for something i paid $699 for), i was suprised (but not really) to see that this new replacement iphone applecare provided me with is just as bad as the first. i got better battery life out of my iphone 4.

i'm a techie, for lack of a better term, and am very familiar with the ins-and-outs of all apple products as i follow mutiple blogs and other sources relating to the nature of apple. i've never been more dissatisfied with an apple product in my entire purchase history... which is saying a lot considering i've owned every new iphone on launch day since the 3G and have a plethora of apple products all around my house.

truly disgusted at how apple employees told me that my phone had 'no visable problems in our testing'... oh that's funny considering i have almost every feature disabled (MOST OF WHICH BEING THE ONLY REASON WHY I STILL HAVE AN IPHONE) and yet my battery drops percentages like it's its sole job. what a waste of money. tim cook clearly needs to lay the iron fist down with the engineers in solving this issue faster than asap. this is clearly a big problem affecting literally everyone i know with the iphone 5.

wake up apple!

oh and the new 6.0.1 did absolutely nothing to aid the disgustingly misrepresented "fantastic" battery life that the company claims during their keynote.. which is supposedly superior to the 4s? LOOOOL GOOD ONE APPLE.

My Iphone 5's battery life has also changed from excellent to bad since updating to 6.0.1.  I''ve never had any issues with my phones before because i always turn bluetooth, wifi, etc. off, don't play games, and usually use only the stock apps.  (I normally just use my phone for texting or sometimes calling.).

The update did fix my 3g connectivity issues, at least most of the time.  Once in a while, I'd still get a full bar signal indicator, but no 3g.  I then have to turn on airplane mode and then turn 3g and data back on to get the now quick 3g connection or disconnection that I want.

This problem appears to be very similar to the ones I experienced with my previoous Android phones.  With Android, you can significantly increase your battery life by rooting your phone and then installing a ROM.  Initially, the Android ROM developers were able to improve the standby batter life by introducing a "deep sleep" mode, but then users had trouble waking up their phones (my Iphone 5's showing full bars and yet no 3G seems to be symptomatic of the IPhone's having "deep sleep" mode installed, but no auto wake up mode when data is turned on). 

But my Iphone 5's battery life draining,although with very quick 3G connections, seems to suggest that the Apple programmers disabled the phone's deep sleep mode or its equivalent, so I get quick 3g connections with the more accurate 2-3 bars from the signal strength indicator, but no more battery savings from standby because no more deep sleep mode.

I've seen some definite improvements with mine on 6.0.1 but I have no idea how much it has to do with the update and how much has to do with signal strength in the area I'm in right now versus where I work. I'll get a better idea on Monday when I start back at work but I really think a lot of this battery drain has to do with these phones over-compensating for lousy signal by being too agressive in how it tries to boost it. To give an idea, my average during this past week has been 2 charges per day. One in the morning at work, one in the evening at home. After a thrashing today (games, constant emails coming through, Facebook, silly Letterpress, etc) I'm charging it for the first time. I dropped it down to 15% in 14 hours. Keep in mind that for an hour I didn't use it at all while I was playing a game with my son on the PS3 (btw, WWE'13 is fun but glitchy as anything). I also only saw 3% drain overnight which is about the same as what my 4 was before I sold it.

In any case, I'm hoping against hope that this has sorted it. I've been talking to my stepson over in Australia and his phone has been brilliant with battery life. 2 days between charges as long as he doesn't use Maps. For the record, since the update I have been running with Bluetooth on, Push on my Exchange account with a 30 minute fetch on my Gmail accounts, Notifications on a few things, Location services on, 3G and WiFi both on (no LTE here yet in NZ), and brightness at about 50% with auto-brightness on. Before the update I had BT off, no push or fetch, notifications turned off (although there are some definite bugs there), and location services  tured off for most apps that can use it.

Wow, your battery life is just incredible. 

Before updating to 6.0.1, I also got excellent battery life.  At first, I thought there must be something wrong with the battery indicator because it took some time (I think about 3-4 minutes or so when playing with the phone non-stop.) for the battery to drop from 100% to 99% even after I've done some internet browsing (with fast connection).

Lucky you

Unfortunately since my partners phone was really bad (12 hours max of light use) I recommended she try the update.. ouch.

She got 5.5hours today with the phone mostly in idle.

In comnparison, my phone is lasting about 24 hours. On one occasion I got around 1 day, 14 hours, with 9.1 hours of phone use.

My girlfriend is on her 3rd phone with Apple. Everyone has had scratches and I think this one is going back.

Also, my mums went back cause of battery and she bought a PadFone 2, and my dads went back cause of scratching and he however is keeping on with the iPhone.

I was lucky, but I am aware of all this, so I wouldnt mind having a stab at one of the other phones like Nokia's Windows phones or the PadFone looks pretty tidy - 16hours talk time and tablet you slip the phone into that also charges the phone and also uses the smae sim card so only one plan..

Im an apple whore look at my list - iPad 3 (****** off about the early update by the way! another thing!), iMac 27, iPhone since 3G all of them, iPods, Macbook prosx2 (retina x1), macbook.. mate I love the stuff but this year has been good for them but average for me.. I have them in my mind as the best at technology, but the iPhone thing 1 out of 4 were good, and of those 1 got replaced 3 times and now a 4th.. making that ratio 1 in 8.

My Retina has been flawless, Samsung panel and SSD.. but again some people not so lucky..