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Bad iPhone 4S battery life?

L

linkandzelda

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 8, 2010
189
0
So I got my 4S on launch day at 8am. Brought it home and slept. Then opened it at 5pm to discover it had 0% battery in it. I thought it was odd as all my previous devices have had at least 70-80% after bought. Either way I charged it until about 9 pm when it then said 100% so I took it of charge and downloaded some apps. Then slept at 12. Woke up again at 12 and there's only 3% battery. I charge it again right round until 5:30 pm where it says 100% again. After watching TV on it for 50 mins (while it downloaded some apps in the background) it dropped 20%. Since then it has been 22 mins roughly and has dropped another 5%. All I did was send 3 iMessages and typed this post while still downloading apps very slowly in the background.

Is this the iPhone 4S? Am I doing something wrong? I just don't remember my i4 being this bad..

P.s. it just dropped another 1%.
 
Iphone 4s- worst battery life ever!

Its not just you..... The iphone 4s has the worst battery life ever!! If they do not do something to fix this- the phone is getting returned. The battery drops a percentage if you breath on it! I've had the phone for a day, and the battery drops so fast- forget doing anything on it for long and hopefully you won't get lost on an island because they will not find you in time before your battery dies! Apple please do something about this.
 
I noticed that with iOS 5, a LOT of apps just defaulted to push notifications when I did not explicitly set them to that. Then the iCloud + location thingy is on so who knows how much battery life takes up.

I would check all your apps first to make sure they aren't the reason your battery is going down fast...
 
If it's draining the battery entirely that quickly, it sounds like there's something defective with your phone. My 4S has had pretty good battery life, actually.
 
Same here... My Phone battery life is too short... are everyone facing the same problem or just some of us?
 
My iphone 4s got it on the day got released around 10am I activated it was having like 75% charge. I used it all day til about 6pm thats when I did charge it and it was like 40% left. Thats as good as it get I think for my phone and seem to take forever for the charge to get drained. You better get the phone back and request a new one
 
looks like I also have a defective 4S. After 3 hours of being turned off and not doing much work on it, the battery level went from 100% to 13%.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)

Same issue. My battery went from 58% to 36% overnight. My iPhone 4 which is still on went from 64% to 60% in the same time frame
 
Thought I was the only one with this problem. My 4S battery is terrible compared to the ip4. 100% down to 54% in a 3 hour time span. And I wasn't using my phone much. Uuuugh!!! Now what to do?
 
4s Terrible battery life indeed!

I was beginning to think it was just my 4s. Perhaps a troubled batch? I am surprised we are not seeing more screaming yet. I have all the iCloud sync options shut off except "FIND PHONE"
 
Well thought it was me, even after setting Notifications to off, also made sure nothing was open at 12:00 am this morning, I had 100%, when I woke up this morning at 0600 I was down 10% so it does have a much worse battery life than the 4, but I will play around with all the settings before assuming the 4S has battery problems, besides I have 14 days, and I am keeping my 4 just in case I return the 4S, however I am not sure keeping the 4 and loading iOS5 will not also kill the 4's battery?

I just think something is wrong with the 4S battery life, I know there are a lot of new features, but I can not afford worse battery life, even if I get a Mophie Power Juice case, I need better battery life.
 
Mine is ok, if it's just sitting there. I find that most of the battery gets sucked quickly whenever I'm using apps that require network connection. ie. Facebook, Twitter or the App Store. More prevalent when the phone doesn't connect right away, and just keeps trying. In this situation, I can see the battery drain 2-3% in less than 5 min. Using other apps, like photo editing apps, batter drains but not as quick. I've worked on some pictures for about 10-15 min, and the battery drains about 3-4%. I guess that's not so bad, considering some of these editing apps do a lot. But my old iP4 didn't use up that much battery life within that amount of time, doing the same thing. Twitter and Facebook still used up more, but not as much as it's doing now.
 
After looking around there seems to be major problems with the battery life with lots of users. I couldnt really belive it when i discovered how bad it was. It seems most people report 1% drop every 3-5 mins. I can say about the same or worse.

Anyhow im gonna do a restore and see if that fixes it. Somone suggested it in another thread although i dont see how it could actually help.

Another thing I'm thinking is that iCloud could be turned off as my contacts list hasnt changed for the past 6 months, and my calender is just my uni timetable. I wish I could just have automatic iCloud off and force a manual sync when i make a change, rather than it polling for stuff 24/7. I would expect thats the cause of the battery life.

But then theres another thing Apple reported 200 hours standby time and im lucky if i get 12... There has to be something else wrong.
 
I just restored my iPhone 4S, setup iCloud and added my Google account. Everything is turned on in icloud except for the Mail, backup and Notes, and the only thing syncing is the Exchange account with Google for mail only. At 22:53 its at 76%. I'm gonna see how it does with no usage for about 30 mins lol...
Then i'll install apps, then i'll start using etc, then i'll disable some features and enable them etc to see how things go.
 
I was experiencing the same drop, about 1% every few minutes. Overnight it dropped 30-40% (not sure exactly) so I knew something was really off.

I've now turned off Location services, and in iCloud - Document and Data I turned off the "Use Cellular" setting. I also cleared everything running in the background. Since then it seems to have stabilized significantly when I was out running errands (dropped about 3% in 2 hours). Now that I'm home again it seems to be dropping faster again, not sure why. Maybe it's doing something with the wireless.
 
This is interesting. After 31 mins of being in standby it only dropped by 1%. That seems a lot better than before. Now i'm gonna install apps. and set the settings.

EDIT: I'm thinking what the possible things could of been that caused the problems and i remember waking up to itunes saying it cant access my iphone for an unknown reason. This was after Wifi sync was enabled. Perhaps i wont use wifi sync this time and see if it has an effect. I also got it throughout the day today, the random error.
 
Last edited:
Eager Beaver said:
If I wanted a phone with a chit batt, I would have gotton an android with a nice sized screen, and turn by turn navigation - :(
Click to expand...

I have the GSII and the battery is fine. I love this phone but the battery is not what I thought it would be. I want to keep it but I'm also having the o sign instead of the 3G sign on my S..I'm on Sprint so its probably on their end. going to Sprint tomorrow to hear what those idiots have to say.
 
Just imagine how bad the battery life would be if they dropped the LTE chip in there! ;)
 
Mine seems pretty good. According to the usage 20 hours of standby and 1 hours 21 min of usage and its at 70%.
 
rittchard said:
I was experiencing the same drop, about 1% every few minutes. Overnight it dropped 30-40% (not sure exactly) so I knew something was really off.

I've now turned off Location services, and in iCloud - Document and Data I turned off the "Use Cellular" setting. I also cleared everything running in the background. Since then it seems to have stabilized significantly when I was out running errands (dropped about 3% in 2 hours). Now that I'm home again it seems to be dropping faster again, not sure why. Maybe it's doing something with the wireless.
Click to expand...


2.5 hours later and I've dropped 2% (no activity other than turning it on and off). That's not great but it's at least acceptable.
 
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