Poor Battery Life iPhone5

I dont really understand the people on here that say turn this off and dont use 4G or location service's or turn the brightness down. i mean come on guys you buy a TOP premium phone and you cant use it as a ( keyword MOBILE) phone as you need to be near a mains every 5-6 hours. i use a 4S which was a step down from the 4 in terms of battery but this is just a joke. the main competition is Samsung and their flagship lasts 2 days or 1 full day on very heavy use. 1440 MAH is just no where near enough im sorry if you do not agree but if apple went down the same road as samsung and put 2100Mah battery then the iphone 5 would be an awesome phone. right now its another phone that has features you cant use. also it is not phisically possible to use the iphone 5 for 1 full day on heavy use and still have 50%+ at the end of the day that is just bullcrap fanboys trying to play this issue down.

Er...depending on how you define "heavy use," you can't get 1 full day out of the 4S either.

Are you actually closing out of programs from the system tray? Because if not, they're still running in the background, using up battery.

I am in full agreement with the points you raised. Form factor, fit & finish will only get you so far if you can't eke out a full day's use from the batteries. There IS another reason the competitors are going with larger (read: wider) screen phones - the overall real estate allows for more physical battery space. Personally, I think that would have made a fantastic iPhone 5!

I would define heavy use as using skype in the back ground and a few email accounts that are setup to push emails and browse the web for 1 hour min a day. To be honest i would class that as heavy use. i think if you have to shut down all the apps running in the background it comes back to the same thing ( Multitasking GONE ) which was a main feature when the iphone 4 was announced. so i do not consider that an option, turning off main features is not a work around its a sacrifice that is just wrong.

I disconnected my 64GB White iPhone 5 this mornig from charging. After 4 hours of normal to heavy use (music, texting, e-mail, web surfing, facebook, and twitter) I am down to 77%. Based on my rate of use I expect to be able to get 8 hours of solid use and be at about half batter life. I'll try to post back with my findings. This is all LTE use by the way- on Verizon network. I don't even use the available WIFI at work as my LTE is way faster. Side note question- I have been using the speed test app- my upload speeds have been way higher. Like 15-17Mbps where my download speeds seem to average around 3Mbps. This is at work in Milwaukee. At home, my download was way higher around 19 Mbps...

So the question is - Is this an issue for people that restored their phone original? Or do people that just purchased the phone need to restore it as a new phone for any change in battery performance?

Thanks

Mark

Retina MAC:

I agree with you. Even with my iPhone 4 I used a mophie battery case simply because I couldn't get the amount of battery I needed for the amount of use I wanted. The suggestions I have provided, along with all of the others, I am saying is a work around until Mophie or others come out with another battery case. You simply can not get from a 1400 mah battery what we throw at it. On the other hand, I wouldn't want a phone as big as the Samsung either. It just wouldn't fit into my hands. Granted, my hands are relatively small but still, my iPhone 5 fits nicely in my shirt pocket. Retina Mac, I realize this doesn't fix anything with my comments but I wanted to share my thoughts why I am willing to deal with this issue.

As for multi-tasking, another observation, last night before going to bed I turned off all my background apps. Plugged in the 5 and this morning I checked email. To my amazement, right after that I saw the App Store showed that I had two updates to attend to. So, just by checking email, at least one other app was still updated even though I had stopped it last night. Go figure. Something kicked the app store to checking in the background. I wonder what else is still running even after stopping the apps. I believe Apple still owes us an update to deal with these issues. It won't fix them all but I bet it will be more tolerable.

I think there are multiple issues and fixes...

My boyfriend downloaded iOS6 to his 4S and restored from the cloud with no problem. He's not seeing a difference in regards to battery life between iOS5 and iOS6.

I on the otherhand bought a new 5 and having never had an iphone before set it up as new. I added an iCloud account, had LTE on and wifi and saw massive drain. I did a Restore from itunes and again set it up as new and the problem did not go away...

I then tried a DFU restore and resored from the cloud and the battery drain got even way worse. 2.5 hours usage at most!

I finally went to Apple, got a replacement phone, didn't add iCloud and have turned off cellular data for the most part when I'm home and I seem to be doing well. I do see a pretty big drain as soon as I leave home and turn on cellular data but it isn't nearly as bad as before.

BTW, I have a good LTE signal throughout my city (3-5 bars depending) and I don't see a need to have to go down to 3G (in fact 3G seems to be less bars).... so I don't think it's searching for better signal.

I had a solid battery life - or at least I thought I did. At first, maybe from the 100% - 80%, it calculates to like 10 hours of battery life in usage. However, when it gets below 80% the numbers fall fast.

Yesterday I was at around 60%. I started listening to music through the my headphones, and using LTE to browse the internet. My brightness is about 1/5 up, my location services only on in Maps and Siri and a Transit app I have. iCloud is off. The battery dropped to 40% after an hour of usage of browsing and listening to music.

I can't really get through a full day with texting, browsing, social networking and listening to music. Hoping it will be fixed because the battery life was a huge reason I decided to go with the iPhone 5 and it's been disapointing.

Stanby mode isn't too bad for me. I do lose some battery but not a whole lot. But when the screen is on it's mind-boggling how fast the battery can drain.

I understand 100% where your coming from, to be honest i do not feel apple can fix this via a software update i feel its purely down to hardware. i used nokia branded phones for around 8 years then i fell in love with the iphone and have had all 5(2g-3g-3gs-4-4s) but i will skip the 5 and try the galaxy s3. i know more and more people are willing to try other phones if they are not 100% happy with the release. i mean before anyone gets angry at me i think we need to remember we all ditched another phone maker and OS to jump on the apple bandwagon. i went thru **** myself the last year as my 4S kept dieing on me and i was using it 90% for work just push emails and maps.

I do think that no matter how many iphone 5's apple sell you need to remember that samsung is starting to sell more and break apples record, i believe there is a demand for products that we the comsumer need.

I agree completely.

Apple but a lot of great features into this device. But to make the phone last to the advertised battery life, you have to turn off all the good features? I think it's stupid to own an iPhone if, to get solid battery life, you have to turn off all the features that really makes an iPhone an iPhone. Turning off Siri, Location Services, LTE and push email really limits the phone as takes away a lot of the features that Apple upgrades each year.

Hopefully iOS 6.0.1 will improve battery life. It can get insane hopw quickly it drains.

I haven't mentioned anything here for a while, but thought I should probably say something since my situation has changed since I last mentioned something.

Whilst I found turning LTE off rectified my issue initially and I could get the issue to return by turning it back on, doing a "Reset All Settings" and starting from new with all the settings (which included turning LTE, all Location Services, Siri, etc on) had fixed my battery issue. I use both a 5 and a 4S during the day and find the battery life of my 5 is similar to that of my 4S now.

You saying you just reset all settings from the iPhone or you did a restore as a new phone and started over?

Also, what kind of times are you having with LTE? Important for people to understand.

Mark

UPDATE... I am now 10 hours and 50 minutes since full charge. My afternoon saw slightly less usage since I was busy at work. I am at 46% battery life. According to my phone usage log: 3hrs 37mins of usage and 10hrs 50min of standby left. Looks like I can make it a full day of regular use without charging my iphone 5. I normally charge it at work or while driving- today was my first day actually testing the battery.

Just a "Reset All Settings".

I pull my phone off full charge at 7:30AM each morning and prior to the reset using the phone as I normally do (hard to explain my usage patterns... use Foursquare to do about 15 check-ins though the day, check Facebook every 30 minutes or so, check up on a forum in Chrome around the time I check Facebook, etc), I found that:

LTE on: 20% by about 2pm

LTE off: 45% by about 2pm, 20% by 7pm.

After the reset though and keeping LTE on however, I can get to 10pm at night and the battery would be at around 35%, still keeping the same usage pattern.

One thing to note though is that we only have LTE when you are close to the CBD. Once outside of that, it is 3G only. Typically on the course of a day, I would be in an LTE coverage area for a few hours only. When I initially had the battery issues with LTE on, I noticed my battery draining quite heavily even outside of LTE coverage and with strong 3G coverage.