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Battery Life awful since 4.1 upgrade on iPh 4??

B

bigserve99

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 22, 2008
6
0
So my battery life on my iPhone 4 has become completely abysmal since I upgraded to the 4.1 OS. If I didn't use the iPhone at all during the day, I would get the end of the day with somewhere between 75 to 80% (and that's all day). Now, since the upgrade....I can watch the % drain literally while I sit there. it's down to 75% charge and it's only been 3 hours since a full charge. it's down to 15% by the end of the day. And this is with minimal to no use, no GPS usage, brightness turned down. Is anyone else having this issue? Should I take this into Apple and find out what'sup?

Thanks for your help everyone.
 
Strange. Maybe try closing all apps and restarting your phone? I was just thinking to myself that my battery life had improved with 4.1. I went 17 hours yesterday with 1 hr 57 min of usage and the battery was in the high 80's.
 
Maybe Game Center push notifications are draining your battery? I noticed slightly worse battery drain since 4.1 but I'm thinking it might be GC push that's doing it. I just turned off notifications for GC. We'll see if it helps.
 
if anything I've noticed an increase in battery life.. that's playing zombie highway, texting, whatsapping, mail pushing constantly, never changed GC so that's probably pushing, doodle jump and fruit ninja

I've got about 60-70% by the end of the day but I plug it in because I use sleep cycle
 
thanks for the replies everyone.....

I'm going to run a small experiment tonight. I'm going to put my iPhone on airplane mode and make sure it's 100% charged. I'll let it sit untouched all night...and see what it's at tomorrow morning.
 
bigserve99 said:
thanks for the replies everyone.....

I'm going to run a small experiment tonight. I'm going to put my iPhone on airplane mode and make sure it's 100% charged. I'll let it sit untouched all night...and see what it's at tomorrow morning.
Click to expand...
I think that's a very sensible experiment, I suggested it myself to someone on another thread.

Please post your results here because these reports scare the hell out of me. I was going to delay upgrading until 4.2 but I just got bitten by the proximity sensor bug today so now I'm not sure.

One other thread had at least one person with problems that seemed to go away once they did a battery calibration (drain the battery by letting the battery go low enough for it to auto switch off and then leave it to charge for about 12 hours) so there was some speculation that it was a calibration issue. If the aeroplane-mode test looks bad then maybe you need to invest a day playing first person shooter games for about 8 hours to drain the battery!

- Julian
 
I had same problem. Went to genius bar and they said my battery was good. Said most likely a software issue. They restored it and now my battery is excellent!

Marc
 
Follwoing multiple battery threads on Apple's discussion site, many think its the Game Center causing the quick battery drain. I'm holding pat w/4.0.2 until its resolved or 4.2, which ever comes first.
 
I downgraded back to 4.0.1 after having terrible battery life with 4.1. Now I was onthe gm though, I donna if that effects the phone or not. On 4.0.1 I would go a full day only dropping in the high 50's, low 60's. With 4.1, I was needing to charge before 7pm. :(
 
Mine is fine so far. I downloaded and installed 4.1 at about 1:30 PM this afternoon, and using my phone normally, including about a 40 minute episode with MobileMe people at Apple sorting out an iCal syncing problem, I'm currently only at 94%. I think that is quite good.
 
JulianL said:
I think that's a very sensible experiment, I suggested it myself to someone on another thread.
Click to expand...

That was me.

I didn't try that, but turning off Wi-Fi overnight made it a little better.

It's been very erratic though.

Today I've had 16 hours 22 mins of Standby and 2 hours 24 minutes of usage, and I still have 63% left.

I'm going to leave the phone off the charger overnight tonight to see if that helps (I don't need it charged for Sunday morning).

I have seen quite a few reports of poor battery life with 4.1 though.
 
I had the same problem. Battery life went down and also my phone would get hot after upgrading to 4.1. Did a quick hard boot and everything went back to normal.
 
I noticed, immediately after upgrading to 4.1, my battery life went down the drain. I'm typically around 70% at the end of my day, but was in the 20's after the update. Several days in a row with horrible battery life.

Since then, I've done a hard reboot...which seemed to help. I'm still getting worse battery life, but the reboot seemed to help. I'm now closer to 50% at the end of the day (compared to 70% with 4.0.x).
 
I think I've seen an improvement in my battery as well. I upgraded and charged the phone Wednesday night and I am at 50% battery right now. Granted, I am positive I use my phone much less than the average owner. Since the upgrade I've used about 6 hours of the iPod and about an hour of Facebook, email and web surfing. I have all push notifications off so I'm sure that saves alot of battery.....
 
im having the same problem after 4.1, battery life has been worst :(

wait for 4.2 and see if they fixed it.
 
My first day with the update, I noticed the battery was draining a lot quicker. I drained the battery completely the next day, since then it is back to normal, and maybe a bit better.

today's stats:

50%
usage: 4 hrs 9 min
Standby: 12 hrs 40 min

Wi-fi on
push on
Brightness about 55-60%, auto on
 
im having some problems also..normally my battery would last me quite some time but lately it has been dropping quite fast. Ive already tried a restore and a hard reset. Going to try a calibration now and check it out for a few days.
 
I have had this since upgrading to 4.1, I don't think it is Game Centre as I turned off notifications and just check the app itself for friend requests now. My usage time was matching my standby time even though I wasn't using the phone that much.

I restored and set up as new and the battery seems to have gone as great as it was pre 4.1 No idea what was running in the background though.
 
It seems to me that there are far too many people here reporting problems for it to be one or two very obscure scenarios, or the odd paranoid owner imagining things; it looks to be a genuine and fairly widespread issue. I wonder if this will get the status of the early iPad WiFi issues, i.e. acknowledged by Apple in a knowledgebase article with a few suggestions for workarounds and a software fix promised in the future; I certainly hope so because it would be reassuring to know that they recognise a problem and are working on it.

The iPad WiFi problem took a long time to fix (and it was bad for people affected, like me; my iPad was almost unusable for the first 2 months or so). Unless something else really nasty comes along that needs fixing in 4.1 like a big security issue then I don't see them fixing the battery issue with a 4.1.1 release when 4.2 is due sometime in November (about 2 months away, maybe 2.5 months at worst) so I think we're in for a wait.

By the way, someone put up a poll about this if anyone wants to vote: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1010697/

For all you people who are suffering, I wouldn't bother mailing Steve Jobs because I think that I can already tell you his reply.... "Charge it more often - Sent from my iPhone"

- Julian
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

I downloaded 4.1 on the 8th, on my iPhone 4, and so far my battery life hasn't changed.
 
Battery life works fine for me. Haven't charged in a day, 2.5hr usage and 55% left. *shrug*
 
daneoni said:
Battery life works fine for me. Haven't charged in a day, 2.5hr usage and 55% left. *shrug*
Click to expand...

I don't think that anyone is saying that this affects everyone. The iPad WiFi issue affected maybe 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 people but it was still a genuine issue that Apple fixed with a software update.

It's probably helpful if people without any battery issue go and vote on that poll so that people considering an upgrade can get some idea if this is a 1 in 5 or 1 in 1000 chance of having a bad experience but if that "*shrug*" was meant to be a dismissive shrug then that's not really adding much to the discussion.

- Julian
 
It's definitely got worse since 4.1! I'm one of those annoying i4 owners that has had no reception/ prox sensor problems with a launch day i4, and a fantastic life, better than my previous iphones, always restoring from a previous backup, but the first day i noticed it worse alot worse.

I'm a creature of habit and pretty go through the same routine of useage each day, so i can honestly see the difference. esp with bluetooth use, as i use b/t headphones at work, and i though the batt last pretty well with 4.0, but now it drains twice at quick it seems! Even now it's lost 6% with 43mins usage.. and that useage is only sending about 10 txts, making a few notes & 5 mins of safari!

Will try the charge cycle on this run, havn't done it with this since i first got it, so maybe it's due one?
 
JadedBen said:
Even now it's lost 6% with 43mins usage.. and that useage is only sending about 10 txts, making a few notes & 5 mins of safari!
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Your old battery life must have been spectacular because to me the numbers above look about right for a normal battery. Apple claim 10 hours of WiFi web surfing or video replay (http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html) and my experience is that other activities that produce low to moderate CPU load and involve having the screen on (e.g. calendar use, reading an ebook, playing card or strategy games, taking notes, etc) drains the battery at a similar rate.

If we say that your usage was sort of like Safari browsing then 43mins for 6% drain equates to 680 minutes for 95% drain (is 5% the point at which the phone powers down?) which is 11 hours and 20 minutes. I accept that I'm assuming that the battery meter is perfectly linear here, and my assumptions about the activities you did being comparable to Safari browsing are open to considerable debate, but it still doesn't look catastrophically bad to me.

What sort of drain were you getting before for a comparable 43 minute set of activities?

- Julian
 
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