iPhone 5 battery life [Merged]

I'm lucky to get 4 hours Usage, wifi only. I've had this 32GB Black iPhone 5 since 8:15am Friday morning where I did iCloud option. Best Buy in Kanata had 4 people in line and I had a preorder, was great. LOL
I have had to recharge 10x since Friday. There is definitely something wrong for about 50% of us from what I read around the web. Apple, please comment already!

First day was terrible, but all my content was still restoring from iCloud. Next couple days were as good or better than my 4S. The screenshot below is mostly WiFi since I was at home almost all day Saturday. I decided not to charge it Saturday night and this was taken Sunday evening.

Dolphster said:

Uh-oh...Major battery drain issue.
BTW..I've had every iPhone, so not skewed on my perspective here.
2 out of 3 nights, I've gone to bed with the iPhone 5 at or near 100% charged.
I only sleep 5 hours exactly....I wake up and the phone is warning me that less than 8% battery life remains.
I'm not doing anything different than my standard routine that I've used for every single iPhone.

Only a few apps were "running", weather channel, Walgreen, Target.
Phone set to pull email every 30 minutes
Running on Wi-Fi.
Phone laying flat on night stand.
I turn off-on, the phone at least once a day to help clear issues.

This is a massive Problem for me....any suggestions???
How does a phone not being used burn thru 90%+ life in exactly 5 hours????

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When I had an issue like this about a year ago it was one of my email accounts constantly having server issues causing the phone to keep retrying over and over. Try turning on airplane mode one night to see if you can isolate a connection issue vs a software issue.

I left the house at 8:20am (about 4 hours from the date of this post) and my workplace has 2-3 bars of ATT coverage. I streamed Pandora for ~45 minutes on HSPA+ and have been casually texting every 7~10 minutes ever since.

I did one battery charge cycle since getting the phone on Friday, and set-up the phone as "new". If the battery doesn't improve by tomorrow night, i'm going to the Apple Store.

Edit: Pic may not be attaching.
Usage: 2 hours, 41 minutes.
Standby: 4 hours, 3 minutes.

LTE is off. Location services are off.

appswipe said:

Two major complaints with the 4/4S was the battery life and low light/indoor camera performance. So the problem I have with the 5 is that they came up with brilliant solutions with a smaller processor and shrunk down camera components. But instead of actually using that reclaimed space to give us a bigger battery or larger lens/sensor for the camera then they chopped it out by making it unnecessarily thinner.


I think the new iPhone is the best one yet but I dont like that going thinner is affecting the overall performance because, to me, USING the phone means a lot more than admiring its profile.

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Correctamundo, iP5 should have had at least a 2000 maH battery to compensate for higher peak drain of the A6 proc, too bad Apple places more emphasis on form than function.

jimmer-uk said:

Currently 15 hours standby 4 hours useage and 71%. Feels a lot better than my 4s battery, I don't have to charge every night!

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Are you kidding, is that on 3G!? I'm on 10 hours standby and 3 hours usage... 30% battery remaining!! The battery is significantly worse than my 4S, I can't even get through a single day with it sitting in my pocket and checking emails every so often.

This is crazy, some of the reviews online have been doing tests where they constantly hit the 3G data connection have seen 7-8 hours usage as quoted by Apple. I haven't even managed to get that much battery on wifi, or just using it as an iPod. Something definitely wrong here.

As with most people, I restored with iCloud, maybe that's the issue but there is no way in hell I'm losing all my settings and setting it up as a new phone.

This has to be iOS related. Too odd that some people are experiencing a better and some others a worse battery life than with their 4 or 4S. Also configuration in iOS.

I restored my 4S to iOS6 and applied the same configuration I had in iOS5 and my battery life doesn't seem to have changed much.

This is what i mean. This was before charging for the 1st time:



This is after 2nd charge


Why did my standby time reduce? I thought it's supposed to get better or stay the same?

At 72% battery.

Usage: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Standby: 5 hours, 48 minutes

However, yesterday it felt like it flew thru the battery. Not so much today.
Yesterday I was driving around (no GPS use). Maybe it's the LTE? Today I have been in the office most of the day and on wifi.

JS82712 said:

This is an ios6 issue; most people who updated to ios6 on their older models also have battery drain (check ios6 forum)

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This is probably true. It seems to be happening with every new iOS update nowadays. iOS5 came with battery drain and now iOS6.

Arkanok said:

Alright so I tried something, I left my phone to charge to 100%, disabled LTE so that it was on 3G and WiFi only, then at 11:25 pm EST I pulled the power cord out and just left it on the desk overnight, completely untouched for the entire duration. At 7:45 am EST I checked the battery level, it had dropped to 90% in just over 8 hours. Then I checked the usage times in the settings, I was fairly surprised:

Usage: 5 hours, 38 minutes
Standby: 8 hours, 22 minutes

Really? 5 hours and 38 minutes of usage time? Nothing happened to the phone overnight so I don't know where over 5 hours of usage came from, but my only conclusion is that there must be some processes that shouldn't but running, running.

Does anybody know what's going on here? I have an iPhone 4 and with the same settings and conditions that my iPhone 5 is in, there's a huge difference. This never happened with the iPhone 4.

I'm very upset about this.

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Arkanok, same as you. let us know if you decide to restore and how it works out.

so far today after the first full 100% > 0% > 100% charge cycle

What would your advice be when getting the iPhone 5 - should I charge it before I turn it on or should I turn it on and then charge it when its low battery or let it shut down?

richpuer said:

How's this for poor battery life?

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That's about what I get on my 4s stock iOS 6...

Before first full charge cycle:


After first full charge cycle:


Both days I was on wifi about 80% of the time and AT&T 4G (not LTE) the other 20%.

I was mostly using Tweetbot, iMessage, Words with Friends, and Scramble with Friends. About 2 hours of call time both days.

Turned off iTunes Match - all good now.

I am also seeing significant drains on my battery. It has had very, very light use ( some browsing on wifi, a couple of texts and one short phone call all weekend). I have drained it down to 0 three times charging it back to full, restored to factory settings ( even though I set it up as a new phone anyway). I have everything that could cause a drain turned off and like I said earlier have been using wifi only.

I called Apple today and asked them if it's software related and the rep said he is 90% sure it's hardware related and to take it into the genius bar for them to run a diagnostic. He did say that he has had a lot of other calls complaining about this same issue. In all other respects, the phone is working great but getting a 30-40% drain every night when the phone has everything turned off and is not being used is just crazy. I will set up an appointment for this weekend (closest store is over an hour away) and hopefully get some answers or have it replaced.

CiFi said:

What the heck?!? I'm at:
Usage: 1 Hour, 44 Min
Standby: 4 Hours, 14 min

I'm at 65%!!!
This phone is a joke compared to my iPhone 4

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I'm not doing much better than this...currently at 61% with

Usage: 2 Hours, 6 minutes
Standby: 5 hours, 37 Minutes

Push off, Brightness @ about 25%, LTE, some texting and web browsing and about 10-15 minutes of Spotify streaming. Haven't touched Maps, Siri, etc. I've been averaging between 5-6 hours before she's dead, and this is what I was consider light-moderate use - it's not like I'm streaming Netflix for 5 hours straight

Going up to the Apple Store on Friday to see about an exchange. Between this battery, some minor wifi issues, and one small scuff out of the box, I think I got a partial lemon and will go ahead and exchange it.

Well I'm coming from a droid x so this has been a huge upgrade for me. The night before last, I went to bed with battery fully charged. I've been using it on and off all of sunday and a little today. Im at 15%.

This is disappointing.

64%

Useage: 1 hour, 59 minutes
Standby: 7 hours, 14 minutes

I must say, the battery life is very close to what my 4S was. That being said, I had LTE turned off most of this time that wifi was available. I did spend at least an hour or so playing graphic intense games.

Battery life did get better after doing a full charge and run down a couple of times.

usage 3 hours 19 mins
standby 6 hour 32 mins
70 percent left.
Seems a lot better then my 4s. With my 4s I would be at 50 percent or less.
Don't have lte at my home so I can't say how that will affect my battery.

I'm not really sure how I feel about my battery life yet. I won't count Friday as I received the phone with about a 60% charge and ran it down before giving it a full charge in the afternoon. But on both Saturday and Sunday I got about 13 hours standby and about 7 hours usage out of a full charge. I don't consider that horrible by any means but it sounds like others are getting a lot more. On Saturday night and Sunday night I let the battery drain completely and the phone shut down before I began charging again.

I have to keep in mind though that both Saturday and Sunday my son and I were playing around with Siri a lot (which really seems to drain the battery freakishly fast) and on Saturday my dad was checking out the Maps app for about 15 minutes straight. I don't see myself using Maps much at all, and once I get past the point of having to ask Siri every stupid question that comes to mind just to see what her reply will be then I won't have those drains on the battery. I do feel I've been using the other features more frequently than I typically would as well - checking out the App Store, downloading various apps, taking lots of pictures and editing them - and have been using the actual phone a bit more as well.

I'm on Verizon 3G (no LTE in my area). Haven't been conntected to wifi as of yet, but I plan on connecting here at work in just a few minutes. (I do normally keep my phone connected to wifi all day at work.) I've turned off all suggested settings that I've read about on here to optimize battery life, screen is at about 25% brightness. I don't really think there's anything more I can do as far as settings go. I go through and manually close out apps that are running in the background several times a day. My phone was set up as new since I came from an Android. All that was transferred were my contacts.

Right now I'm sitting at 3 hours, 26 minutes standby and 1 hour, 13 minutes usage and I've got 87% battery left. If, on average, the phone can at least last me the typical 15ish hours from the time I unplug the phone in the morning until around 10:00 at night when I go to bed, I will be happy.

One nice thing I've found regarding the battery on this phone is that it charges really fast! I can go from completely drained to full in an hour! That's probably the fastest charge I've ever had on any phone.

Adutrumque said:

Care to post how good? Your post holds absolutely no value.

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then ****off, care to reply me back?, your post holds absolutely no value

I don't have any exact values yet, but I'll take a screenshot tonight after using the phone all day. Friday, I used the phone all day but it didn't die completely at night. Saturday, battery life was pretty terrible. It would drop 2% during the minute or 2 that it took me to read through one page of a MR forum thread. But the meter sat at 1% for about 45 minutes before the phone finally died, so I think it definitely needed recalibration. Sunday's battery life was remarkably better, and last night I did a second full charge cycle (run it down til it dies, let it sit for an hour or 2, then let it charge fully). So far today, battery life seems really impressive. I've been using lightly it for about 4 hours, on and off, and I'm only at 95%.