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

Tried updating iOS. Tried 2 full restore to new as apple suggested. Sent diagnostic to apple. Result is the same.  The iPhone 5 *****. The 4 had good battery life but was fragile. I have drained the battery to zero several times by just leaving on standby for more than 5 hours so full recharge is not the answer either.

Totally frustrated. First apple lost its innovation edge and now quality is in crapper. Predict company will be rim or Nokia bound in 2 years.

See my reply on this thread https://discussions.apple.com/message/21204331#21204331

ok... well as for my issues, they were either the phone was still running apps in background even if i already manually closed them or bad LTE coverge.  Anyway, had ip5 32gig white since november.  At first phone was doing ok, would have good battery on Wifi which can last me about 3-4 days standby and about 9-10 hrs of usage.  I did set up as new phone and manually downloaded apps.  After about 2 months,for some reason the phone began to have those battery issues as many are experiencing.  Even on standby battery was draining.  I was about to take it to apple for an exchange.  I tried a complete restore to see if that woukd help but battery drainange persists.

I was still running 6.01 and didnt want to update since i heard about bad batter.  After running a few compkete charge cycles meaning draining battery to zero and also deleteing all my aps and redownloading them, battery issues dissapeared.  I then decided to downlod 6.1... everything was still normal.  I am mainly on wifi, but thes are the usage times i am consitently acheiving.  I have everything on except bluetooth and i limit the locaton and notifications for apps that i use only.  So i dont think its a hardware issue, since mine went from good to bad then back to godd again.  Well hopefully i can put at ease some who assume its hardware related.

I'm using an iPhone 5 16 GB White. Initially the battery life was appalling, and my sister who used an iPhone 4 suggested me to back up the data and restore the phone. After the restore, it felt as though nothing has changed at first, but now I am getting results like this:

This is normal right? Started of with 97% of charge, I've left the Location Services switched throughout the day, used the 3G moderately, used WiFi heavily, used Temple Run 2 extensively, used the camera a bit, browsed Flipboard, iMessaged, Facebooked, Whatsapp, Instagramed, Gmailed, calls, browse the net and used a Bible application, browsed the App Store and downloaded and application and used the BBC Sports app. I might have missed a few things, but those are the majority of it. What do you guys think?

Here is a weird tip for everyone. This is a long shot and most of you probably don't have this problem. Yesterday, I needed to set my alarm and I noticed that my stop watch was running. It had been running since I purchased the phone. It doesn't matter if you close the clock app. That stop wartch still runs 24 / 7. I turned off the stop watch and cleared the time. It may be my imagination but my phone life seems slightly better

Hello everybody,

Here are different screenshots from the 3 i5 sets. They are at different times ( some on wifi others on 3G and 2G ).

All were taken after the update to iOS 6.1.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/93188676@N03/?saved=1

Hi,

I've failed to respond quicker due to a business trip I had and also because I was away from my home mac. But yesterday evening I backed up, restored from DFU, set up as new and then put back the old back-up.

Don't want to jinx it yet, but the results are: took the phone off USB charging from the mac at 10PM after the full restore, didn't charge it at all (11:15 AM here now) and now I am at: 91%, usage 1h 26, standby 13h 23 min - I was only on wireless. To be noted is that I feel like the "usage" time is inaccurate - I only checked the correct restore of some settings and the battery percentage from time to time - but my estimation is way lower than the usage times displayed.

iCould is on only for contacts, calendars and find my iphone. Location services are on for the apps I use currently and need it. I deleted then re-added after the restore both iCloud account and yahoo mail account.

I will report back after I completely discharge the phone, but I am a little bit happier untill now.

I have an iPhone 5 with Sprint. I used to have an iPhone 4 with Verizon and I remember getting really good battery life.

On my i5 I have it at minimum settings, and I even put FaceTime in wifi only and reset. I've been tracking my usage and in 1 hour of usage my phone went down from 100 fully charged to 90% is this normal or is there still a problem? I'm on 6.1 btw and recently did a full restore and activated the iPhone like new not from backup. 

are you on wifi ? are you on 3g/4g ?

10 % drop in 1 hour is pretty normal. Do tell us what is your usage when it reaches 1% ever since your on 6.1

I am on 3G with LTE off. I had exchange to sync my contacts only however I saved all my contacts to iCloud and deleted exchange. Also, I did a few more tweaks and the battery seems a bit better. Just for reference, the battery would drain to single digits and I only had 4 hours and change, while with the i4 I had over 5 hours usage. We'll see what happens now, I'll post results. Still think apple should roll out 6.1.1 for i5 to address issues.

are you using alot of gps or radio ? what are some of the applications on a daily basis

I restored to new and as per apple support did not put any apps back on the phone.  Apple says my battery is fine.  I lost 7% after full charge and 14 minutes of usage.  I have turned off all notifications but phone and email, I don't use any gps, location or radio.  Email fetch every 30 minutes.  My service switches between LTE and 3g regularly, and it occasionally can't connect to websites even though I have 3 bars or more.  I am really frustrated by this issue of poor battery performance which existed prior to 6.1 but is worse than ever now.  I am over 2 hours from a apple store - any new suggestions?

Should also mention 10 hours of standby with 2 hours of usage would be outer limit and I have only gone 2 days in 5 months where the battery has lasted a full 24 hours.

The fact your phone service switches from LTE to 3G and back regularly would be throwing a red flag for me. I would call my carrier as well to see if there is anything going on or that they can do for you on their end. To be honest for me 6.1 didnt help my battery times at all but when my carrier expanded lte coverage in my area I noticed a small improvement

For me the issue was iTunes Match.  After i upgraded to 6.1 my battery life went down the drain.  I tried every system level setting to try and get it back but it wasnt until i turned off iTunes match that everything went back to normal.  My guess is that it was stuck in some kind of sync loop in the background. 

I have not reactivated it yet as I dont want to find myself with the battery issue again and unable to fix it so right now im ok without itunes match on the phone.  With a 64GB iPhone 5 i had little use for it anyway.  I'm sure there's multiple reasons behind battery drain, this was just mine.  Hope it helps!