How do I improve my battery life?

What do you mean by "exended use"?

Set brightness to lowest possible without it becoming uncomfortable. Mine is at around 20% in most indoor situations. Turn off LTE if you don't really need the extra speed. Turn off bluetooth when not in use. Use wifi as much as possible.

Disable push/data fetch and notifications for stuff you don't want. Turn off connections (BT, Wi-Fi, LTE) you are not using. Disable location services. Set brightness lower. Restart every once in a while.

In any case, 3.5 hours even of "extended use" sounds abnormally low to me.

Drain your battery until it is completely dead and then charge it up fully. I use my iPhone a lot and never had such a poor usage. It could be faulty. Is it in warranty? Why not make an appointment at the apple store?

I dunno if this is possible with the US iPhone where you can toggle LTE off, but with my european one, I can toggle 3G off, leaving only Edge on. Granted, its dead slow, but battery life is just insanely good this way (can use the phone extensively for a day and still have 50% battery left).

Ive got push mail on, wifi on, location services on, bt off. and a fairly bright screen.

You can always check Apple's tips for battery usage here.

I don't see how anyone could have issues with battery life on this phone, unless they actually use it all day and nothing else.

syd430 said:

Set brightness to lowest possible without it becoming uncomfortable. Mine is at around 20% in most indoor situations. Turn off LTE if you don't really need the extra speed. Turn off bluetooth when not in use. Use wifi as much as possible.

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These two would probably be the most important factor. If you use your phone heavily, I would too would recommend not using LTE and try being on wifi as much as possible.

90miles said:

You can always check Apple's tips for battery usage here.

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This single link sums up this thread. Great post!

3.5 hours usage isn't good. Unless you were using the camera the whole time or heavy gaming, sounds like something is wrong.

The worst I ever get is 7, as high as 10.5 if I stream music for an hour or 2. On average I get 8 hours of pretty heavy use, in fact it's nearly impossible, or at least very rare for me to get from 100% to 0 in one day. I actually did yesterday, but I was up until 3 am, my stats were 10.5 usage, 17 standby, about 1.5 hours was BT streaming music. Normally I end a day with anywhere from 15-35% left, and 4-6 hours use. The 5 IMO has the best battery life of any iPhone, including the 4. Plus, pretty amazing they accomplished this while making the phone so fast and powerful.

That's not to say everybody is getting great battery life, clearly some aren't. Hey, my wifi isn't quite 100%, but I'm afraid to swap for fear I get a 5 hour battery life phone. Always a trade off it seems. I'd rather deal with minor wifi issues and hope for an update than take a chance on losing the great battery life.

I think the OP has a bad battery or an app/process that's misbehaving. 3.5 isn't acceptable from this phone.

There is almost no way you can significantly increase your battery life there might be some mail settings you could tweak but that is about it. It is what it is, you maybe able to squeeze an extra 15 min or so here or there but there is no way to really tell since it is almost impossible to duplicate the same usage in the real world usage. You can do constant netflix streaming but that is not a real use case(for most), even then you could be getting tons of email or notifications.

This is assuming you don't have some type of faulty battery

Battery life streaming video is better than the iphone 4, but that's about it. It's probably a bit worse overall for me. Of course, the performance is 8 times as fast so I can't complain except for the ridiculous price of non-existent lightning accessories.

Not sure if this is significant, but I find that turning off iMessage, increases battery life a lot. Took phone off charger at 615am and it's at 41% 11 hours later. Lots of text.....some browsing.....2 hours of talk......does iMessage really suck that much battery?