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What do you consider acceptable battery life for the iPhone 5?

  • 3 - 4 hours

    Votes: 4 1.8%
  • 5 - 6 hours

    Votes: 28 12.7%
  • 7 - 8 hours

    Votes: 80 36.4%
  • 8+ hours

    Votes: 108 49.1%

  • Total voters
    220

iPhoneApple

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 24, 2011
417
0
My battery dropped 15 percent while sitting in my pocket for 3.5 hours. I think I might need to do a restore
 

XboxMySocks

macrumors 68020
Oct 25, 2009
2,230
198
This.
 

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wesk702

macrumors 68000
Jul 7, 2007
1,809
368
The hood
I get about 5-6 hours of real usage and > 24 of standby.
I'm satisfied because my iPhone 4S would barely last 13 hours with hardly any usage at all.

It was weird with the 4s because I would purposely not use the phone all day, then when I open up the usage it would say like 4 hours of usage when I didn't even unlock the phone.

I hated the battery on the 4s, the 5 is a blessing.

Wouldn't mind another few hours of usage, but definitely satisfied.

The worst is Maps. This drains battery quicker than ever before.
 

akdj

macrumors 65816
Mar 10, 2008
1,186
86
62.88°N/-151.28°W
I use my iPhone no different than I did with my Galaxy SIII & Galaxy Nexus yet the battery on this iPhone drains about 2x faster than both those phones.

This isn't intended to start an Apple vs Android blow-up, but the quick battery drain is the first thing I noticed after making the switch to the iPhone 5.

I suspect that a software update can help remedy this since my previous Android phones had battery drain issues as well until Jelly Bean was released and the battery life improved due to the OS doing a better job of killing background processes.

My usage is typically...
1-3 phone calls a day
10-20 texts a day
50 minutes of listening to music while on the train to/from work

With my previous phones I could go 2 full days with the above usage without a charge before being left with ~10% battery remaining. With the iPhone 5 my phone has ~10%-20% left in it by the end of the day.

I think someone else brought this up. You've got a 'bum' iPhone. Don't worry about starting a 'war' of OS'es...lol...plenty of Droid fans in these parts...including myself. I enjoy both iOS and Android. I've got the GSIII and the GNote as well as an iPhone 4, 4s and 5. Unequivocally, hands down...the iPhone 5 battery is a revelation.

For those thinking they may have issues...give it a month or two. It's still brand new to most of us. Showing others our phone. Playing a casual game or ten that you normally wouldn't...streaming Netflix. LTE. The speed or browsing is often faster than our desktops at work:). When you settle in and use the phone in a more 'common' way after owning it for a bit...you'll get a better idea of performance

The biggest killer is gaming. Streaming video over LTE with a negligible or poor signal can also drain it quickly. BUT...LTE alone is NOT a drain factor in my opinion in comparison with my Android counterparts. My iPhone 5 easily doubles both my Note and GSIII battery run times. I returned a GSIII thinking it had a bunk battery to AT&T. The second was identical. Nice Samsung still allows access to switching out the battery and I understand their reasoning to still offer the option.

J
 

NovemberWhiskey

macrumors 68040
May 18, 2009
3,022
1,272
I was getting fair to poor battery life before the Verizon update to fix the LTE while on wifi bug. After the fix, my phone goes 1 day+ without a problem with 5 push accounts, maybe 1 hour of LTE (rest on wifi), gaming, messaging, browsing, etc.

Basically, it gets me through the day, from the time I wake up to the time I go to sleep, with room to spare (which can be 18 hours+). That's all I need: to get to bed time where I plug it in.

That's great battery life imo. I can use it for 45 minutes (browsing) and over 1 hour of standby before dropping from 100% to 99%.

For most cases, I don't think you have a bad battery. I think it's your LTE/3G signal. A poor signal can cause really poor battery life.
 

divisionbuyzero

macrumors member
Sep 16, 2012
75
2
This (with brightness near 70% all day). It actually lasted 20-30mins after this screen shot.
 

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XboxMySocks

macrumors 68020
Oct 25, 2009
2,230
198
Wow! That's double what I get on a good day.


Also, if you restore a phone as new and then add a backup would it improve the battery?

Nope.

The whole point of restoring a phone is to remove all the rogue API's that bog down your processor (rogue processes that run often/hard when they do run) and to start the phone fresh - it's especially noticeable when you restore a phone unjailbroken from a previously jailbroken phone especially if you had tons of hacks/tweaks/api's installed.

I used to get 3 hours out of my phone hardly using it after restoring from a previously Jailbroken backup. What you need to do is restore it after backing up to iCloud and saving all your things like apps, music, photos, etc to your comp. Restore it and set it up as a new phone, then connect to your iCloud account. 'liquid' assets like contacts, keyboard shortcuts, most personal settings will be pushed to your phone without a backup thanks to iCloud, then if you sync your phone to your comp you'll get all your apps, videos, etc back.

Only thing you WON'T recover is texts. Literally.
 
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GREEN4U

macrumors 6502a
Mar 24, 2010
678
392
I have Sprint in Los Angeles. I think I have really bad battery life:

currently at 50%

Usage: 2 hours 30 minutes
Standby: 8 hours

I charged it over night. This is pretty bad right?
 

XboxMySocks

macrumors 68020
Oct 25, 2009
2,230
198

Hahaha that's with about 6 hours of surfing Wi-Fi (basically just updating Twitter and Facebook apps though), about half of it playing music, along pretty constant texting/iMessaging. You can do it too if you do a full restore as detailed in my above post. Turn off push for mail & I have LTE off as well.
 

iPhoneApple

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 24, 2011
417
0
Nope.

The whole point of restoring a phone is to remove all the rogue API's that bog down your processor (rogue processes that run often/hard when they do run) and to start the phone fresh - it's especially noticeable when you restore a phone unjailbroken from a previously jailbroken phone especially if you had tons of hacks/tweaks/api's installed.

I used to get 3 hours out of my phone hardly using it after restoring from a previously Jailbroken backup. What you need to do is restore it after backing up to iCloud and saving all your things like apps, music, photos, etc to your comp. Restore it and set it up as a new phone, then connect to your iCloud account. 'liquid' assets like contacts, keyboard shortcuts, most personal settings will be pushed to your phone without a backup thanks to iCloud, then if you sync your phone to your comp you'll get all your apps, videos, etc back.

Only thing you WON'T recover is texts. Literally.

Is there an app to save texts. I think I might need to do this.
 

Dolorian

macrumors 65816
Apr 25, 2007
1,086
0
I think that if you can get through the day (say 8-9 work hours) with a single charge under normal use, then the phone has good battery life. I could do this when I had my iPhone 4 and can also do it now with my Galaxy S3. Both have great battery life from my experience.
 

KittyToy

macrumors 6502
Sep 6, 2007
441
23
Davenport
I'm on chat apps n Mac rumors most days.. Few calls n texting, lots of emails I unplug usually before bed n it stays unplug till about 8 at night when I get in from work
 

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JonMPLS

macrumors 68000
May 23, 2010
1,672
242
MN
What we need is a standard test

I can play around at home on WiFi for 8 hours+, but switch to 4G and it's down to 5.5. Unless I add some movies or music, then it's back up.

What would be interesting would be some type of standard we could run. Like 2 hours of a video and check the change. Starting at something under 100 to equalize things a little.
 

aznguyen316

macrumors 68010
Oct 1, 2008
2,001
1
Tampa, FL
What exactly counts as usage? Does that mean screen on time?

I get about 15 hours of phone standby with my S3 and about 3 hours of screen on time. So I'm curious what usage means on here. But I also listen to music etc while screen is off. Just curious in comparison as in the Android world, screen time is usually what's figured in the battery tests along with total hours since unplugged.
 

TM WAZZA

macrumors 68000
Sep 18, 2010
1,967
1
Hamilton, New Zealand
What exactly counts as usage? Does that mean screen on time?

I get about 15 hours of phone standby with my S3 and about 3 hours of screen on time. So I'm curious what usage means on here. But I also listen to music etc while screen is off. Just curious in comparison as in the Android world, screen time is usually what's figured in the battery tests along with total hours since unplugged.

Basically anything you do counts as usage. That includes screen on time as well as music time.

I come from android and I know that it has a more in depth analysis of battery usage
 

Dukat

macrumors 6502
Mar 9, 2012
305
74
Once the phone is active, background apps keep a network connection going for a certain amount of time, I believe 5 minutes but could be wrong.

I had less than 40 minutes of screen time on my phone today and it says 4h 13m of usage. The only explanation I can think of is every time it pulls my email accounts, it runs for 5 minutes before network timeout. Every time I click the phone on to check the time, weather, etc, no matter how short, the 5 minute network timeout counter is engaged.

If that's not the case I don't know how else to explain usage times I'm seeing as I don't use the phone even a fraction of those times... and I don't do anything with the screen off, like music.

First charge I had mediocre battery time. Second charge was horrible. It would drop 8% after 5 hours of not being touched. Then dropped 30% in 2 hours with me checking email several times. (This is with location services, blue tooth turned off, most apps removed from notifications, email pull every 30 minutes and brightness at 25% and disabled everything in spotlight search but contacts and apps). I then used the Nav for turn-by-turn guidance for 10 minutes and it dropped 10%!

I then did an "All Settings" reset. Didn't seem to make much of a difference at first, but then drain seemed to slow down. I then saw a suggestion to turn "Auto Time" off. Doesn't make sense that it would be a big drain on power, unless there's a software bug so I tried it.


It's currently at 57 hours standby, 5h 10m usage. True screen usage was maybe 60 minutes, 6% remaining.

Don't know what improved things in the 3rd charge. Still far below what I got with the 4, but much better than the previous charge. If it doesn't improve further I may do the DFU reset.
 
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Archer1440

Suspended
Mar 10, 2012
730
302
USA
Changing my mail setting from push to hourly fetch dramatically increased my battery life. 30 minutes of use at 30% screen brightness on wifi, have done about six manual fetches, standing by for 8 hours since last full charge and the battery reading is still 100%.

With push enabled, I could literally watch the phone drop a percent every five minutes in use right off the charger or ~10% per hour doing nothing.

I did disable many apps from notification center, but didn't change spotlight, the auto-time setting or location services. All of those are fully active.

Edit- dropped to 99% while posting this on the phone using dictation.
 
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