iPhone 5 short battery life?

After not being happy with the battery life of my new 5, I started reading all these forums for help. I didn't want to do the full rebuild as new so I tried one of the other tricks I saw on here.

I deleted both my email accounts(Exchange and Yahoo) then re-added them. Seems like it made a difference.

I am at over 2 hours of usage and 6 hours of standby and at 71%. That is way better than I was running earlier this week.

Sounds like an iOS6 issue. Hopefully 6.01 is coming soon.

I posted yesterday about my problem being dramatically improved, and it's gotten even better. Now it's great battery life for a smart phone. I had been on the verge of returning the phone like so many of you.

I didn't turn a lot off. The only location service I turned off was compass and map as I don't care about those. The important change yesterday was changing the mail setting from "push" to "fetch manually". After that, last night I synced up to iTunes and charged with the usb into a laptop. This morning I watched and it's now been over 12 hours While most was standby, I have talked on the phone, listened for a while to an audio book, listened to some music, and it's now still got 75% battery life after 12 hours off a charger.

I'd say the big differences were the email setting as well as the syncing. Also I did turn off wireless so it wouldn't search for wireless during my travels and I'm sure that contributed to the improvement. I went from wanting to return the phone to loving it. Make sure you just don't have some settings that keep the phone polling or looking for some service that's not necessary. Also, I think the syncing up and charging overnight seemed to really make a big difference. While some of you may have hardware issues, I'd say try some config settings and syncing before giving up.

Loving my phone and my battery!

I was getting exactly this! Could just about set my watch to losing 1% every 2 minutes. As soon as I start streaming music or watching a video, it drops like a rock. A 5 minute phone call drops the percentage 4-5%. Wake up in the morning at 100%, leave for work an hour later with VERY little use (email, few minutes of web searching) it's down to 85%!!

to follow up on my posts from earlier this week:

- i swapped out my phone at an apple store last night

- there was 60% battery life out of the box

- during the 20 minute drive home with the phone on 4g/LTE the battery remained at 60% and the phone was not hot

- i immediately plugged the phone into the charger once home and restored from iCloud backup

- at 10:15 am this morning i unplugged the phone and launched the twitter, instagram, and camera apps and refreshed my feeds once

- it is 1:30 pm and my battery is at 92%

so far, it appears that the power usage and heat issues i had with my previous iphone 5 do not exist on the new one and power usage is at or near what it was with iOS6 on my iPhone 4 with all settings the same.

So I just turned on my iphone5 for the first time yesterday afternoon. Had it plugged to my computer and charging until about midnight. Unplugged it when I shut down the computer, left in standby mode overnight, made a phone call this morning, got on facebook for a little while, now 14 hours later it is at 80%. I am guessing that is a decent drainage rate overall. I am new to smart phones, this being my first, so I just wanted to put that out there and see if I am doing OK with this. Thanks.

I have a question. We all do have the problem with our iPhone 5 battery. And we hope it's an iOS 6 bug, not a battery hardware issue.

Is it possible to downgrade the iPhone 5 to iOS 5.1.1? If the batter would last longer than, it would be a proof for a software bug of iOS 6.

First day with mine at work. Been using my iPhone4 for a few years.(Upgraded to iPhone5 - 16MB Wifi)

I charged it to 100% this morning. The settings are the same as my iPhone4 and I did a restore when I picked up the new one yesterday.

As I sit in my office, I observed the following.

iPhone5

from 9am -12 down to 31%

iPhone4

from 9am -12, down to 70% +/-

This is really bad. Everything is faster but the only thing I have been doing is a bit of browsing and around 15-20 emails. No apps run.

hmmmm...

- at 3:10 pm i left the house with twitter, instagram, and camera apps active

- about 15 minutes later i noticed my leg starting to get hot (phone was in my pocket)

- at 3:35 i returned home having lost 14% battery life since leaving at 3:10 pm

- the phone was not used at any time during those 25 minutes

it appears that there definitely is some sort of issue with battery usage, whether related to hardware, software, or both.

there is no fine print in the tech specs for iPhone5 that say the indicated useage and standby times are contingent upon limiting the functionality of the phone and various apps by turning off settings or disabling features.

having to do so is not an acceptable solution to this problem.

in the time it has taken to compose this post my iPhone has lost an additional 2% of its battery life while on sitting on my desk and on my home wifi network.

the iphone 5 should have never been released ...im on my 2nd phone with all the same problems and a few new ones !

Well, since deleting my email profiles an reinstalling them, my battery life seems to be a lot better. I am currently at 1 day + 9 hours of standby and over 6 hours of use and still at 30%.

We will see how it advances over the next week of use and charging cycles.

Hi All,

I don't believe in turning off functionality on a beautiful phone as iPhone 5. Here is what I did, and it did make a difference to me (I was a victim of the battery issue).

1. Go to Settings --> Notifications

2. 'Not In Notification Center' - Ensure all the new applications installed by each one of you, have not only the notification Center turned off, but also ensure you turn off unwanted apps - (Good to have Alert Style as None)

a) Badge App Icon

b) Sounds

c) View in Lock Screen

I did all this and from earlier, my power was draining out anywhere between 2%-4% every hour. Now it has reduced drastically to 1% maybe in 2-3 hours 🙂.

And I can't take my hands off the phone, which is why even the 1% every 2-3 hours, else that also should increase with time. Plus, feel free to use 'Do Not Disturb' from Settings frequently when you really won't be using the phone (sleeping, driving, meetings).

Over the air (wifi backup to iclouds also consume a lot of power, turn it off and do it once when you are charging the phone)

I believe, the new OS is taking time for people to learn about, as it contains 100's of new functions, which we have to get used to in time, and causing all these confusions. It is a great phone people, trust me 🙂.

Cheers,

Vishnu

Definitely drain the battery down. Some of the issue might be the battery status component in the phone. Mine drained down to 1% and ran for another 20 minutes!!

I unfortunately have similar problems. First off, this is my first iPhone, so I have no base to compare things to, but it has been far worse than my 2 year old Droid X that I replaced and I though that one was terrible on battery life.

Today my results went from bad to worse. I took it off the charger at 9:15am and 3 hours later it was down to 56%?! For one of those hours I was surfing the web and playing 1 game the whole time, Matching with Friends. My LTE coverage was 3 bars most of that time and I was outside in the bright sun, so the auto-brightness had the screen at full brightness. I know the Zynga games have been bad on battery life in the past and I know having the settings on the highest brightness would drain the battery more than normal, but does that seem normal under those conditions?

I have almost all location services turned off except for Facebook and Foursquare, I also have notification services turned off for everything except email and Facebook. And for kicks I even turned off LTE, but not until the battery had already drained to 56%.

Prior to today, under heavy usage I have been able to get until around 5pm some days and until around 8pm other days before I had to charge it. I still think that is quite weak. I will put things through some more tests before I go into a store to have things checked out, but I'm hoping things will get better through an iOS bug fix or something soon.

Twice as fast at the first 2 days and now i call it 30% faster.

A little update.

I think that the fairly poor battery life I have been experiencing is linked to the fact that Rogers has mediocre LTE coverage in my city (Ottawa). Although I have LTE signal in most spots, it seems weak. As soon as I place the phone in my pocket, it seems to revert back to 3G and hunting for LTE signal. In my informal tests, I have disabled LTE when I know the signal is low or likely to switch to 3G. It seems to dramatically improve battery life.

Has anyone else here in Ottawa or elsewhere tried or experienced this?

I guess I will be forced to toggle the LTE option on and off when needed if I want to experience good battery life....

Thoughts??