Poor Battery Life iPhone5

Ok I got my iPhone today and the battery drained in 2 hours when it was on 80 percent and on airplane mode

Same thing, Got about 7 hours of fairly light usage out of mine after unplugging it the night before. It drained about 10% overnight, while I was sleeping with all the apps closed. I can't even get through a full day on a single charge, where I could fairly easliy do it on my 2 year old Iphone 4. This definitely needs to be fixed. Draining of a battery while the phone is not being used sounds like a software issue where the phone is doing something it really shouldn't be by communicating with the tower a little too much.

So this is probably stupid but once you reset all the settings is it okay to adjust them back to how you had them such as turning off notifications for certain apps and location servicesm or will that put me back at the start?

heimsothe:

I would say yes. BUT, the whole idea here is to find a way to get good battery life while at the same time not having to turn off features.

I have further information to share with everyone also:

Late last week I spoke with a senior technical advisor who asked a number of questions regarding usage. The conclusion was that the battery drain might be coming from rogue data downloads/uploads via cellular instead of via WiFi. For instance, we were able to identify a bit under a gigabyte of downloads over night even while I was sleeping. Obviously, this would kill battery life. So, it was suggested that I turn off Cellular Data.

Merely go to your settings app then general then cellular. Select cellular and turn off cellular data. Your phone will still act as a phone but that setting will turn off any transfer of data via cellular. So, if you have Wifi at home then it would merely use Wifi for your Internet connection and not use cellular. Last night I turned off Cellular data as just described and went to bed. I woke up at about 5:30am found my iPhone 5 had reached a full charge and disconnected the charging cable. Went back to sleep and when I woke up at 8:30am (I'm retired) I found that the battery had only gone down 1 percent to 99%. WOW. I used it today and the battery seemed much better. So, to experiment, I turned back on cellular. To my amazement, I didn't get bad battery life again. It is possible that by merely turning off cellular and turning it back on again after a period of time that the problem might be resolved. I then turned on notifications for other apps I had previously turned off. Still, the battery levels are still at great levels.

It would be good for others to try this to see if others notice the improvements I did.

By the way, you can check for yourself the amount of cellular usage you have by going to your Settings app, then General, then Usage. Then scroll to the bottom and locate the Cellular Usage. Observe your Cellular Network Data received to see if you had a large amount of data received. If so, you might be a candidate for the above procedure.' Also, if you are an ATT customer, you can log into their site and find out exactly when large files were downloaded. In my case there were a number of them while I was sleeping that were transferred by cellular even when my Wifi was on and working. Also, I had the iCloud turned off. I had no large emails during that time either.

Good luck

I just turned off my cell data. I am at 15% now and was thinking about doing one last full cycle (I've already done 2 since I got the phone 2 days ago. Should I let it die and do another full cycle or plug it in now?

I took the reset and rebuild approach, the only difference in he current settings is that I have 4g off. (I live in a non 4g area).

But, even with it on, my battery life is MUCH better than when I restored from a backup.

I went from 1% per minute to 40% per day, if I'm too busy at work to use my phone, I can get it down to 20%. And I have location services, push, 3 email accounts and 5 calendars going. oh yeah, and when I do listen to music, I stream over 3G (12 hours of streaming on a single charge)

Ps. My 2c is that when your restore from backup, all the apps come back in a full running state, not a background state. But I have nothing to prove this and am not prepared to reset my phone to test it. A friend is getting his today, and he only does restore from backup, so it will be interesting to see if it comes right without a full reset.

Go ahead and plug it in.

Will do. And as for the reset of settings am I supposed to do that with 100% battery and plugged into charger?

That would be the safe route.

I thought it would be worth sharing. I have done some further experimentation with battery life (using Carat as an scientific instrument of sorts) and, for those who have turned Push off like I have in my experiment, this may be a major contributor to poor battery life for whatever reason. Will others look into it to see if what I have found hold true?

Ok, so as I said I went to the apple store and got a new phone. At the beginning it seemed to be having poor battery performance as well; any ways I kept it and did 4-5 full charging cycles (letting the phone die before plugging it) and now it works just fine. Yesterday I charged completely and disconnect it around 10. Today when I woke up around 7 am it was still 100%. This morning I went to the hospital and stayed there from 8 to 3. I used my phone the whole time (music, browsing the internet, podcasts, many apps, plus messages). Now it is 5.20 pm and still have 33% which I consider fair enough having in mind the heavy use I gave to it today. Still, I might say that I restored the phone as new, I have e-mail push off, and only necessary apps on the notification centre and location services. So if ur phone still works really bad (mine used to drop 30% in an hour of usage) I strongly recommend you to take your phone to an apple store and get it checked.

I did a few things so I'm not exactly sure which one of those has helped for the moment...

I signed out of my itunes account, did a full dfu restore, left it plugged into iTunes with the "set as new /restore from back up screen on, set the actual phone as new, went to settings/safari/turned off fraud, disabled safari in restrictions(was reading there was an issue with safari etc), signed into iCloud disabled a safari in there, went back to the iTunes screen and clicked set up as new phone(normally when you do this and haven't taken the steps I took it will download some Safari Safe Browsing stuff to your phone. I didn't want that because who knows what's eating the battery!!, I then synced my stuff from iTunes onto my phone, re did all my settings etc and downloaded Google Chrome to use in place of safari (it's good!)

And just now I did what this thread says to do and shut off cellular data but keep wifi on and my battery isn't draining NEARRRRRLLYY as fast (I always have full bars of service lte/4g)

So something here seemed to have really help...............

This all ***** but I would really give this a shot if you are desperate and will try anything because as of right now.... This phone is more stable battery wise then I've seen it since Sept 21st.

Think the most salient point to mention is the experience of many 4 users who have updated to IOS6

They notice the same battery drain issues

Seems it must be a IOS.6.1 update needed to address apps that are rogue or more so the cell data that seems to really cane the battery.

ok so then it's not just me i've already returned two iphone 5 and i'm on the third one i took black this time thinking that i got a bad batch from the white ones but clearly from reading all the posts it's the phones. My phone would charge in like 40 mins and then die in like four hours the percentage goes down by just looking at the phone lmao. all my push notifications are off i'm closing all the apps in the back and my brightness on my screen is turn down to almost nothing and i'm still having problems i really don't know what else to do.... any advice???(those of you who got your battery to stop draining)

Pretty much make sure you have stuff that will drain the battery turned off. It's a shame Apple included all the great features the iPhone 5 has and you can't use them without having to charge your device multiple times a day, but it is what it is.

So turn off Bluetooth when not in use, turn of Wi-Fi when not in use, make sure you have a good signal and it's not always searching for service, turn off push notifications for apps you don't really care about push alerts for, turning off Siri helps, turn off LTE, make sure you're not connecting to iCloud in the background, put your brightness on low or auto-brightness, turn your mail to manual receive instead of push and make sure location services are off or only on the apps you need them for (such as Maps, Weather and Siri). These are some ways you can improve your battery life. If these fail to work, reset the phone's settings and don't restore from a backup. Hopefully iOS 6.1 fixes these battery issues because right now it's getting a lot of complaints.

My battery life isn't too bad. My brightness is about 1/4 up, Siri on, LTE on, iCloud not checking in the background, push email off, location services on to only some stuff. My battery is at 54% remaining with 2hrs 56mins of usage and 6hrs 59mins on stanby. However, the first hour and a half of that was spent mostly gaming which drains the battery extremely fast. Normally I get 7-8 hours of usage and 16 hours on stanby within the day and my battery ends up nearing death within the end of the day.

Definitely doesn't have the 8 hours of LTE browsing that Apple said it would. I found even listening to music drained the battery quicker than I thought. I get a lot better stanby time than some people here do. Stanby for me barely uses any battery so I'm really happy about that. It does drain fast when it's in use, though.

I also used to find that when I first unplugged the phone from the wall, it would take 30-45 minutes of moderate usage to actually get down to 99% and then it would start going more rapidly. Lately, it's been going down to that 99% a lot quicker - like 6 or 7 minutes of usage and 20 minutes of standby. Then it decreases faster. Today I actually unplugged it from my computer and stepped out of class and it immediately went down to 98%. It must not be getting that full charge it used to for some reason.

I purchased Apple Care extended warranty so if anything is wrong with the phone/battery itself after the first while I'll be able to get it repaired.