Poor Battery Life iPhone5

I am pretty sure the battery drain is due to the fact that Cellular Data is turned on, as far as my phone is concerned.

1) When Cellular Data is turned on, the battery drains 20-30% overnight, even when all apps are killed.

2) I turn off Cellular Data (with all apps killed), and the battery drains only 2-3% max overnight.

3) Same thing happens in the day - with Cellular Data turned on and apps like FB, Pulse and Chrome used intermittently from 3-5pm, the battery life plunges a whopping 60% and i'm left with less than 40% by the time it hits 5.30pm. That's only a little over 2.5hrs of usage.

And LTE is perpetually turned off 😟

Is anyone from Apple reading these posts?

I mean, I call them 3 times about the battery and all their solutions are not only not worling, they make me use the phone in a manner that is just NOT optimal. I want to have all the stuff I could do with my 4s and still have 70% of batterylife at 8pm.

As it is, it's only a matter of a few hours. COME ON GUYS at APPLE' can you please fix this ?

I'Va had tons of apple products over the years and I've never been so disappointed. It is simply unacceptable.

What can we do ? A recall ? A collective complaint ?

I'd like to thank Apple for completely destroying my faith in them.

Ordered the black 64GB iPhone 5 on my contract upgrade and out the box it had scratches on the paintwork and there was a rattling from the phone. Returned it the very next day and reveresed my upgrade. I then did a bit of research online and found that this was a very common problem.

I waited a month and went into the apple store in Buchannan Street Glasgow and bought the 64GB white iPhone out right. Checked it in store and there wasn't a scractch on it. Did not restore from backup and set it up as a brand new phone. The battery life was terrible. The phone ran warm and drained rediculously quickly. Did a battery cycle and reset the settings. Still terrible life and running warm. Took it back to apple and git a box swap and started from fresh again. Cycled the battery twice, Both times the battery life was dire and the phone ran warm. ran the battery flat and then upgraded to the new IOS hoping that this would fix the battery. Battery still drained and I couldn't even work out how much usage against stand by I was getting as the phone reset those details all by itself ,midday.

Took it into the apple store today today and got a less than helpful Genius how ran the diagnostics and declared that there was no faults showing. He checked the diagnostic log and there were no errors showing even though last night there were at least 4 showing. I explained that I only took the phoe off charge at 8am and the battery was at 46% at the time of my appointment which was 11:20am.

i was unhelpfully advised by the genius that the phone is fine and it must be "environmental issues or the way I'm using the phone" I pointed out to the genius that the days I've been using the phone I've been in work and therefore hardly able to use my phone so it's not the way I'm using it. He then went to swap the phone for a service phone and was less than happy that I wanted a new box as I'd purchased a brand new phone I wanted it replaced with a new box. He was extremely rude and said that they've no phones left to sell so it was either this or refund. I decided to go down the refund route due to the poor service and the fact there is clearly a problem with the iphone 5 that they were unwillng to acknowledge.

The evidence is overwhelming. The fact that this was my second phone running hot and draining quickly when both phones were set up as new, the fact that there are numerous web pages, reviews and forums dedicated to poor battery life and the fact that there are people that have positive experiences with the battery would show that this is a widespread problem and may be handset batch specific.

Your right I also got poor service from the people at apple. It's evident that they know something is wrong with the battery life on the IPhone 5's so what do they do make seem like it's a you problem instead of it bring on their end I'm on my Third 5 and still no improvement with the battery life I looked at all the advice people gave tried it out still nothing it's so frustrating on Sunday I charged my phone twice and I'm talking both times drained to 1%. Apple really needs to read theses reviews and do something oh and I also updated the iOS they released last week and its made it worst

Hi

You have tried everything?

Have you tried setting the phone up from scratch, NOT reloading your old profile?

I had all the furstrations you are having and am on my second iPhone BUT I finally bit the bullet and did the setup from scratch.

Painful but not too painful.

The same iPhone that woudl not last more than 6-7 hours with hardly a call made now lasts all day on a single charge and I often have 30%-40% left after 14 - 16 hours on time and 4-5 hours of usage.

Same phoe a WORLD of difference.

Robin

Yeah. Both phones were set up from scratch. No restores done from back ups.

Cycled the battery. Tried a few of the different suggestions of reseting the settings etc. Still horrible battery life. Spoke to 2 colleagues that have iphone 5s and they have no issues with it running hot or anything like that.

Double that with that horrible service instore and I am not happy

Did you do anything else other than set up as a new phone

One thing I am hyper sensitive to now is the arrow icon.

Whenever I see this on, when I dont think it should be I close every app, nothing in the task bar.

And it usually goes out after a little while.

I am pretty sure it was this arrow (I think it is telling you GPS is running) is what caused most of my problems as my iPhone always felt warm.

now it is always cold.

I think some corruption or something happned and I was transefing the issue from one phone to the next.

I did not even connect my iPhone to the computer for 2-3 days after setting it up, I downloaded most of my apps directly on the iPhone, just to make sure I was nt copying anytjing back on to it and it was working correctly.

It is **** frustrating when you have this problem and I can really sympathise as I was ready to throw mine through the window bt now it is working fine!

I hope you find a solution to your problem.

What kind of usage are you getting now.

I set mine up from new both times which was annoying.

only thing I copied from my compuetr was music and some pics.

The arrow wasn't on on mine but drained like mad. Even today i took it off at 8am had some mainstream use on it and it was down to bout 46%. Think I'm going to wait until after christmas and decide from then what i'm going to do. Though seriously thinking bout switching to android now

I'm also on my third iphone 5... I cannot tell exactly what fixed the issue but there're 2 things that I did and since then the phone is giving me around 16 hours of stand by, and 8 of usage... enough for me to go through the day. 1. the ios6 update that came couple of days ago. 2. And I think this is the real fix, I deactivated on my iCloud the safari option, which would make some sense if you think about your phone constantly having to sync in order to have all your icloud tabs open on your phone, and your reading list. I was very frustrated as well, but since that, phone has been giving me a good performance closer to my 4s.

1st thing I did was deactivate the safari in icloud. Only had it to sync my contacts and calander

So today it says it is 10 hours since I disconnected from charger and it says 4 hours 50 minutes of use.

I have been making and getting calls, played a few games, listened to some podcasts while walking the dogs etc.

Currently showing 42% battery.

The safari suggestion makes huge sense so I have just turned this off and will ssee if I get any improvements.

Before, when I was havig problems, usage and standby often said the same number and I coould not get through 8 hours without getting down into the single digit percentages!!!!

Robin

I feel your pain. I did escalate the problem to Apple via a phone call to them. Here is what occurred:

1. Suggested to turn off automatic mail to isolate whether or not email looping was occurring.

2. Suggested to turn off GPS to all apps which simply do not need it. i.e. Angry Birds simply doesn't need it.

3. Suggested to turn off all unused apps which may be misbehaving. (from multi-tasking area)

4. Suggested to go to your carrier's web site and locate the data usage area for YOUR phone. Then look at that detailed information and note any times where cellular data transfer should not be happening while you are in on a Wifi connection (like at home). If you see, like I did, tons of data transfer on cellular when I was asleep, then that confirms that issue. Apple has ways of correcting that issue.

5. If, after all that, you have some concrete information to share with Apple, they can send you either an sms or email with a link which will provide your phone a separate profile which can then later be used by the engineering staff of Apple to diagnose the exact cause of the problem. But after I performed 1-4 above the problem stopped. One of those was causing my problem. But Apple did want me to add a profile so I allowed them. It is now being evaluated but it doesn't look like I will have to have more support as my problem went away.

6. The iPhone 5 has a built in system of recalibration of the battery status system. It has been shown that, when a particular phone has a badly calibrated battery system that it will take a number of days for it to reset.

My phone is now usable all day. I slowly added back the items I turned off and left off those GPS location services to those apps which "I" determined dont need it turned on.

I totally empathize with everyone's problem. Trust me when I say that Apple Engineering is working on this and have already fixed a few of these battery related problems in the 6.0.1 system update even though it wasn't advertised. I did not notice any change to the battery issue when I upgraded to 6.0.1.

I'm retired so I had the time to spend on this. Many of you don't have that time so I hope by documenting these here you can benefit from the time I spent correcting this issue. In my opinion, individual "Genius" people at Apple stores is nothing but a crapshoot. You may get a good one and then you may not. Escalating it via the Applecare number is a more productive option. When you eventually get escalated to the people I worked with you are dealing with personnel who deal with these issues all day long. My last contact with Apple support ended yesterday which is why I am documenting it now.

Cheers

Edit: Forgot to mention one other item:

7. Turn off iCloud backup. When the iPhone is first being used and you have configured your iPhone from an old backup it just makes sense that there will be a lot of data transfer to the cloud when it is being backed up to the cloud the first time. That can take days to do and maybe longer. For me, I had restored from my iPhone 4 which had over 700 apps on it. The backup took over 8 gig of space in the cloud. So, that could have had a huge factor when you first use your iPhone 5.

If I remember anything else I will edit some more. (grin)

Message was edited by: Three60guy

I'm on my second iPhone 5, but not for battery issues. I had a dead pixel on my iPhone 5 and they replaced it with a new one. I don't notice a difference in the battery life, and don't notice a difference in battery life from 6.0 to 6.0.1.

I actually have a weird experience. I've put my mail on manual and I still lose one percent of my battery every 2-3 minutes of usage. My standby time is great even with push email on. I barely lose a percent whe I'm not using the phone.

On Wi-Fi, I get great battery life. With the screen brightness dimmed to the lowest and on Wi-Fi the whole time, I pretty much got 1.5 days of stanby and nearly 10 hours of usage (pretty much all texting and browsing). However, on 3G or LTE, I get about 4-5 hours of usage.

I've pretty much tried to limit myself on using the phone for as much as I can. I just use my laptop more or something. I have my Bluetooth off, auto-brightness on, Wi-Fi on when I can use it, LTE off unless I know I'll get 3+ bars.

I bit the bullet and returned my iphone.

The final straw was the apple genuis this morning. His customer service was shocking as was his attitude. Had I read your post before I may have kept it. But he really annoyed me and didnt have anything like the advice you've given or even bother going through trouble shooting. There definitely needs to be better communication through all apple stores world wide when this happens.

Hopefully enough people will report this that a fix will be built into new phones.

I'm going to leave off changing phones for a bit and carefully consider whether i move to android or stay with apple