Poor Battery Life iPhone5

Excellent test. This tells us something.

Mini-Mac wrote:

neth holden wrote:

Try doing Settings > General > Reset > Reset All Settings. I had an overheating, battery-draining iPhone 5 yesterday, and the reset seems to have fixed that. Battery life was reasonable today, and the back of the phone was no longer hot.

A restore would probably also work, but a reset takes much less time.

It seems to be similar to the bug that hit many people in the iOS 4 -> 5 update last year.

This not only helped......It cured my problem.

I could try this, however, I've already done a full restore once without using my backup file in iTunes, I completely went from scratch. To me, resetting all settings seems like it would accomplish the same thing as doing a restore and not restoring from a backup. Though, I suppose anyhting is worth a try at this point.

Arkanok,

Do you have iCloud and/or sync via wifi activated? I believe that when you first set up the phone and get it configured, is does an awful lot of behind the scenes activity, syncing and backing up. Seems that mine did this most of Friday and Saturday, then seems to have settled down since then.

There have also been a large number of app updates to deal with and I'm guessing that as you update them, the backup/syncing thing will kick in again, to keep everything current. Don't panic and give it a few days.

ALSO --- Remember that the 4s suffered from poorer battery life than did the 4. The 5, with only a very slightly larger battery, will probably never live up to the battery life of the 4, but will HOPEFULLY, be slightly better than the 4s. We'll see.

In googling the issue I came across this tool: Carat http://amplab.cs.berkeley.edu/2012/06/14/carat-now-on-ios-and-android/

It's supposed to capture stats to help diagnose battery issues. I've just installed it and will run it for 24 hours. I'll post the results here. Would be helpful if others install and do the same - for analysis.

Unfortunately though I've already tried and reset my settings. Hopefully I'll be able to replicate the issue.

Guys, I did a reset of my Iphone and started using it at full charge.

With LTE and Siri turned off, i basically used it to make calls n send messages using whatsapp n the native message app.

It has been 6 hrs and I still have 90% battery life left, so that's excellent!

It used to drain at least 40-50% even when left idling overnight with all programs turned off.

Resetting might be te key to the battery life problem.

Are the "resets" most are trying a full start fr scratch without a backup fresh copy of iOS 6, just for craps and giggles?

Jameson! wrote:

Arkanok,

Do you have iCloud and/or sync via wifi activated? I believe that when you first set up the phone and get it configured, is does an awful lot of behind the scenes activity, syncing and backing up. Seems that mine did this most of Friday and Saturday, then seems to have settled down since then.

There have also been a large number of app updates to deal with and I'm guessing that as you update them, the backup/syncing thing will kick in again, to keep everything current. Don't panic and give it a few days.

ALSO --- Remember that the 4s suffered from poorer battery life than did the 4. The 5, with only a very slightly larger battery, will probably never live up to the battery life of the 4, but will HOPEFULLY, be slightly better than the 4s. We'll see.

I do have iCloud and sync via wifi activated, yes. To my knowlage though, sync via wifi shouldn't actually do much of any syncing unless I tell it too, and even still, 5 hours and 38 minutes of usage from being idle overnight is much too excessive. I don't have iCloud backups enabled though, my backups are still set to my computer.

But, just for comparison reasons, with my iPhone 4, I've had all of the same things set, iCloud always on and sync over wifi.

But, I've just done a reset of settings on the phone and I'll see how things fare in a short time.

I hit 'reset all settings'.

Battery life is sweet right after that.

dayromper wrote:

I hit 'reset all settings'.

Battery life is sweet right after that.

Sadly, not for me..

Sorry to hear that.

The lady from Apple Support told me to do a full reset (complete wipe of all data) IF reset doesn't work. If that fails, then grab your phone and head for the one for one exchange.

I know we find this difficult, but I would suggest the following:

Once you have dones the netowrk reset thing, LEAVE THE PHONE ALONE FOR A FEW DAYS. Use it as normal, charge is as necessary, but stop fiddling with settings and let things settle out. Mine was performing poorly for the first two days, but by Sunday, it seems that it has settled out nicely.

thank you it works....

I have some interesting observations to share with everyone.

First, my wife and I purchased 2 iPhone 5's. But because she had to go on a knitting retreat all she had was a factory iPhone 5 to use. I on the other hand had an entire weekend to restore my almost 700 apps on my iPhone 5 from an iPhone 4 backup. All went fine on the restore.

I too began to notice the terrible battery lasting conditions. But when my wife came home last night I asked her if she saw any battery issues. She replied no. Hmmm

Some time ago I obtained a memory utility called PKiller. It basically is a "process killer" which kills apps while keeping required software intact in memory. To my amazement I discovered there were a ton of open applications running in the background. AND because the iPhone 5 has doubled the amount of available RAM (1 gig) there were way more apps running than with my iPhone 4. I used the "feature" of killing the background apps from within the PKiller app and then monitored the battery.

Well, what do you know boys and girls...... The level of battery usage dropped dramatically. After charging the iPhone 5 all night (with no apps running in the background) I then disconnected the charging cable at 7 am this morning and rechecked the battery level at 9am. It had only dropped "ONE" percent. This was a vast improvement from yesterday.

So, I am now starting to conclude that it is the sheer number of multi-tasking applications running in the background which is causing the battery problem we are all observing. If you were not lucky enough to get PKiller when it was in the App store when it first came out you will notice it is not there anymore. It was itself killed by Apple soon after it was put up in the store. Why? because of that "feature" which kills apps. Apple wants you to do this manually by double clicking the home button to show the list of apps running in the background and then double clicking on an app to get them to wiggle. You can then kill all of them one at a time.

Granted, this is a safer way of doing it but Apple could be nicer (much nicer) if there was an option just to kill all background apps with one stroke of a slider or something. I had something over a hundred apps running when I had the battery problem. One thing for those who still have PKiller, even if you do kill the apps from within PKiller you would still see a fantom list still there when you double click the home button. That also could have been the reason why Apple withdrew the PKiller app from the app store.

SO.......... it might be useful if a number of people use the manual approach to killing those apps which access the Internet or do other background intensive activities and see if your battery life increases dramatically like mine did. It does make sense. But understand, by killing those apps will also stop the usefulness of those apps with no notifications etc. (which is the reason they were still running in the background)

Sorry for the long post, but wanted to be fully clear about what my observations were and the results I was having. I am looking forward to responses to this idea. Also, has anyone actually found a battery management program which actually does something useful? None I have seen really do.

Apple, you people have done a fantastic, no ultra fantastic job with the iPhone 5 and with iOS 6. I bow to thee (as usual) and I understand there will be things that will come up after both a hardware and system software upgrade. But this problem has been with us for many years. Please look into the multi-tasking / manual killing of apps situation. With the sheer doubling of RAM on the iPhone 5 we now, more than ever, need some tools to manage our running apps. They take more battery to run especially if they are Internet/bluetooth/gps intensive in the background. We all truly appreciate what you do but I believe it is time to focus on this.

Once we have some level of consensus and agreement that this helps, maybe a bunch of people would take the time to share this info with Apple. My fingers are hurting. (giggle)

Cheers

Rees Roberts

Racine, WI