Poor Battery Life iPhone5

I've used my iPhone 5 for more than a week now and I have to say the battery life is a joke.

And don't get me wrong, I've tried everything, resetting network settings, resetting all settings and even restoring the phone a couple of times.

Usage times on 3G are in the range of 4-6 hours (6 is when I'm lucky) and standby times between 13-17 hours.

That is worse than the battery life of my iPhone 4 on 3G after 2 years of heavy use.

I am extremely disappointed with Apple. With iPhone 4 I didn't have a single issue in 2 years of use.

I'm usually happy with the quality Apple provides, but this is an absolute joke.

I was happy at first, the phone's really fast and snappy. But now I feel the only reason I have forced myself to use this phone is because of the money I have invested in the apps.

Anyway I don't wish to rant here. I have gone thru countless forums and articles to increase the battery life and have tried various suggestions but none have increased the battery life significantly. And I refuse to accept this from a week old phone that I have spent more than a 1000 USD to purchase.

I am thinking of getting a replacement but I've been reading on here and other threads that the replacement units are coming in with the same issues.

So is their anything that I've missed or not tried that could be of help? Will getting a replacement be of any use or should I wait for iOS 6.1 hoping it will solve these issues?

Got my phone last week. iPhone 5. Hardly use it, no 3G, no Siri. And it can barely last the day. It's terrible.

I got my iPhone last week. Running iOS 602 without issue I think. I get 8 hours of usage time and nearly 18 hr standby. Should I be getting more ?

You are very lucky to get that. Most of us are getting between 4-5 hours average usage depending on what we turn off :(

Sid,

The notes are not restored. I have them backed up to iCloud (selected on iPhone). But when I go into the iCloud application, it doesn't show that notes are backed up.

This is all not very straighforward.

Craig

I am not sure that is an accurate statement. In the first three days, apple sold 3 million iPhone 5s. So there are tens of millions of iPhone users and only a few hundred are reporting problems here. You are the minority, the unlucky few. Sorry.

Craig,

I am trying to solve the battery problem. Getting any kind of data back on your device is no problem at all. Most of the devices have shown a 30-40% improvement in battery life after the steps I listed. I am monitoring a couple of my friends devices and will report back on the performance.

Please let me have your latest specs on standby time, talk time, with all needed faatures turned on and bright set to about 40%.

My iPhone was as bad as the ones listed in these discussions lasting 5-6 hours only. Now am able to get a standby time of 20 hours or a talk time of 4-5 hours depending on my email usage. My brightness is set to 40%, mails are retrieved every 1 hour, Bluetooth is always on, 3G is always on, wifi is always on. This is pretty acceptable to me.

Am still monitoring my phone and will share the latest specs.

Thanks!

Sid

Sid,

Here is some data. Charged phone to 100% and unplugged it at 9PM. I did not touch the phone until 6AM. Here is the usage:

usage: 59 minutes

standby: 9 hours, 30 minutes

cellular data: 2.3MB sent, 10.6MB received

battery: 97%

Craig

This is what you have to do. Plug your phone in overnight. Wake up in the morning and take a screen shot of your phone lock screen showing time and battery percentage. Do this every hour on the hour for at least 4-6 hrs. Make a genius appointment. Repeat taking pictures the next day showing date, time and battery etc. Show Genius your screenshots. Genius will DFU your phone in store and send you on your way. If you are like me the DFU will achieve nothing and you will have to go back, however do repeat all the screen shots before second appointment. What I am saying is get all your ducks and information in order before going to the store or contacting support. I got my phone replaced yesterday. It took me five minutes. They know something serious has happened to a whole bunch of us after the last update. Apple will not acknowledge the issue at this time but are replacing phones IF there is evidence of a massive battery drain. I cannot stress the power of politeness and screenshots.

Hanging out in this forum complaining to each other is not going to solve your battery issues.

Get on the phone to support. They will not charge you until you agree to charges. Make a genius appointment if you can. Do not go to your phone service provider if you can avoid it, they are always useless. Only deal with Apple.

The iphone 5 is designed to be used. Fiddling with settings and listening to all the suggestions can be fun but you will have to deal with Apple eventually and it has always been pleasurable and efficent in my experience.

You are correct. As frustrating as it is only a small percentage of users of all models, were borked by the last update. The problems cannot be solved by DFUs, fiddling with settings etc. The users have to contact Apple. I just had my brand new iphone5 replaced yesterday

This is my second phone. My first phone did the same thing and I went to the Genius bar. They restored my phone to factory, but didn't restore my content and had me use it a few days. They they looked at the usage and determined that the phone should be replaced. However, the second phone performs similarly.

I think the bottom line here is that there is certainly some problem with this phone, either hardware or software, that causes it not to perform according to the power specification. Apple is not going to officially acknowledge anything here because as far as I know, it's not affecting sales. Yet.

I've decided not to work on this anymore because it's become a waste of time. But this will probably be my last iPhone.

I got the iPhone 5 one week after launch, battery life was great for 2-3 weeks, I didn't install any iOS updates, no new apps that I hadn't used before, but out of the blue the battery started acting up and my phone would heat up. A full charge at 9 AM in the morning would be drained out by 3 PM. I turned off Bluetooth, location services etc, restarted phone, nothing helped.

Took it to the apple store, they asked me to restore as a New iPhone. Did that, Battery worked fine for a couple of days, but the issue re-occured soon after. I took it back to Apple got a replacement phone. The Genius Bar folks have no clue how to solve this btw, they told me it is a huge problem and is being caused by corrupted software (app or iOS not sure). So after I got the replacement phone, set it up as new phone, added my apps and **** no, same freaking issue. So I restored it once again and decided to troubleshoot it myself.

Here's what I knew about the issue -

- Battery Drains, phone heats up. (Phone Heating Up is the cue here folks, so if it feels hot, you have a problem)

-Internet Based, coz when I go into Airplane Mode, the Battery Life improved substantially, phone didn't heat up.

- I have on multiple occassions, turned off all apps, Bluetooth, restarted and yet the phone would continue to heat up and drain, so I doubt its an app, rather some settings in the iOS which use the Internet.

Here's what I did -

Connected my phone to Itunes, set it up as a factory restore and set it up as a new phone. iCloud restored all my contacts etc., added the apps I normally use (Maybe 3 pages of apps).

Then I went into settings for iOS and changed some settings, here are my current settings -

Airplane - OFF

Wifi - Connected (Though it doesn't matter much if you're on LTE/3G/Wifi

Bluetooth - Off (I only turn it on when I'm driving)

Notifications - I turned off notifications for all apps I didn't need 'em from

General - iOS 6.0.2

Limit Ad Tracking - Off

Diagnostics and Usage - Don't Send (This might be the key)

Siri - ON, Raise to Speak - Off

Cellular - ON, Enable LTE - On

Brightness - Auto

Privacy - Location Services - ON

I have it turned OFF for all Apps except -

Facebook, Maps, Shazam, Waze, Siri, Weather, Yelp, Find my iPhone

iCloud

Mail - ON

Contacts - ON

Calenders/Reminders - ON

Safari - OFF

Notes - ON

Passbook - OFF

Photostream - ON

Documents and Data - OFF

Find my iPhone - ON

MAIL, CONTACTS, CALENDER - (4 email accounts)

Push - OFF

Fetch New Data - 30 Mint

Facetime - ON

Comparison of Battery Life - (with same amount of Usage) on the SAME PHONE.

BEFORE - Full Charge overnight, 100% at 9AM, 60% at 12AM, 20% at 3PM, Fully Discharged by 5PM

NOW- Full Charge Overnight, 100% at 9AM, 60% at 6PM, 40% at 11PM, still 25% at 9AM the next day.

This is a really frustrating issue and I was literally pulling my hair out when this started happening, I had to carry my charging cable, everywhere I went. I've owned an iPhone 2G, 3GS, 4 and now 5 and this was the 1st time ever I had this issue or even had to go to the Genius Bar. I can tell you that this is definately a Software Issue and the Apple folks dont know the answer yet.

Try out these settings, make sure you set up the phone as a new phone before you do these settings and report back on the Usage.

Good Luck..!

i have the exaxt problem with the folks here.....i bought two phones on Dec '12 for my birthday... and it's a really big mistake..). Let me list it down here...

1. One phones is obviously working fine, and the other don't.

2. Battery start to heat up, warm .. etc, and drainage within 4-5 hours

3. I called up AppleCare (if they even care).... 3 times (logged multiple cases) with the service centre and the service provider

4.I logged calls/walk-in to mobile service provider multiple times and refuse a replacement

( They all sing the same tune and song - they deny there's no problem with the phone and refuse replacement)

4. I've restored /DFU my phone at least 10 times now. I could even memorize all the settings tweaking in my sleep.

5. I got a hefty bills of data usage (because data is not unlimited here).. i just don't know why. I never use more than 500MB on my iphone 3gs and iphone 4. The telco is pending my case, and the only way is to go to court to claim, no fun. I would probably bite the tongue and pay. But it's not fair...it's really not fair.

6. I have to carry my charging cable everywhere, as if my life depending on it.

7. Finally god tested me enough. I walk-in to mobile service provider multiple times, get the manager, hogged the queue for 3 hours and finally got a refurbished set.. 😟 T-T

8. I thought everything was over...... My 2nd replacement set started to act up again after a week.

9. It's now Jan. It's already a month. I have a life.

Apple could test all they want, but spare us from the misery. You sold 10m of phone, but you refuse to replace the few hundreds unfortunate us.

1. I will not buy another apple products, because we not treated fairly.

2. None of my frens would get an iphone either.

3. We had enough...

Your problem seems that you tried to deal with your phone company who will do all they can to do nothning at all. I do not know if you are near an actual apple store but that should be where you are going. I know this first hand.

I am wondering if my battery life is good. I'm afraid it isn't, but want to be sure before I freak out over it too much.

currently, my phone is on 62% battery life. I have used it for 2 hours and it has been on standby for 27 hours.

my usage has included mild web surfing with music from speaker, adjusting settings, a music video, a short phone call and a few messages. call time is two minutes, cell data down 3.2 MB, up 768 KB. mostly i've been using wifi. since I started writing this, at 12:19, to 12:25, the battery went down to 61% (about six minutes per percent while just typing and switching to settings twice). is that normal? I saw someone with 13 min usage and still 100%. thank you.