3GS battery has drained overnight two times in the past 5 days. Not sure why.

[botsmack]

I just bought a new iPhone 3GS about 2 weeks ago. This is my first iPhone, so I'm a newbie, so to speak. I've been using it during this time and so far it's an awesome phone. However, last night and this past Friday night, the battery has drained.

Friday night drained it till it died. At first, I thought there was something wrong with the battery, because when I plugged it in to the wall to start charging, nothing would happen. It took it about 2-3 minutes before I got notification that it was charging. This might be by design, though. The battery was between 50-55% before going to bed.

Last night was a little different. I woke up to the battery being 13% when just 7 hours earlier it was at 60-something%.

I don't know what's going on and what to check. Just before the weekend, I installed the new Facebook 3.0 app, so I thought that might have something to do with it. I uninstalled it and the iPhone seemed to keep a charge overnight for the next few days (until last night).

Last night, I installed a few apps, one of which is BargainBin which supposedly offers push, although I didn't enable that. I've verified in the settings that notifications are turned off. In fact, I really don't have any app notifying me at this moment.

I do have Gmail and an Exchange mail account setup and that's it as far as things I can think of.

I'm not inclined to think it's a bad battery or hardware issue since it was fine Saturday evening and Sunday evening and all evenings prior for the past two weeks. Friday & Monday were the evenings that the battery drained. The *only* weird coincidence I can think of is that our Exchange server was having hiccups both of those nights where the mailbox store went offline. Could that be contributing to the battery drain? I know Exchange on the iPhone is push, so maybe when the Exchange server went down the iPhone was constantly pinging it or something?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Edited to add: I should mention that I am on 3G and both Bluetooth & WiFi are disabled. I've not needed to use it yet as 3G is sufficient in my location. Brightness on the device is turned down to about 30-35% with automatic brightness control enabled.

The only thing I sync with Gmail and Exchange is mail -- no contacts or calendar.

 

[-aggie-]

I would suggest you do a DFU restore (restore from a backup) and see if it works better. Otherwise, it does sound like you have a battery problem. You could calibrate the battery, but since you already let it die, there's probably no need (and that just makes the meter show your battery life more accurately).

 

[botsmack]

I'm not sure what you mean by "DFU" restore. I'm just going to go into iTunes and tell it to restore and see what happens. I've had other issues pop up now that seem weird to me.

Since I was curious as to what might be running in the background, I decided to get the iStat app. I was charging my iPhone and once it got to 100%, I unplugged it and went back to work. Well, a few hours later and the iPhone still reports 100%. What?! Even sitting in standby, it should have dropped a few percentage points. Figuring it might have something to do with iStat, I uninstalled it. Nothing changed. I rebooted the iPhone and now the battery says 99%, but the top notification bar where it tells you the time, carrier, and battery status is blinking/flashing. It looks like a corrupt animation. It's also prompting me for my unlock code. When I cancel out of that the flashing stops. Now if I try to unlock it, there is no more flashing of that bar. Strange!

So, I've gone into iTunes and told it to restore. It is still on the "Restoring iPhone firmware..." dialog box at the moment, so I'm not sure what happens next. I don't know if I should restore as a new phone or restore from one of my backups. I don't care as long as I don't lose my apps and notes.

Should I take this back to the Apple Store and ask them what they think? I don't want to return it only to have it replaced by a refurbished model. The phone is only 2 weeks old.

 

[-aggie-]

You can restore as new as long as you synced your notes and apps to your computer beforehand. Notes sync to outlook; not sure what they sync to on mac. You should have transferred all app purchases to iTunes. Even if you mess it up you can still restore from a backup later if need be.

DFU RESTORE is this:

http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=1034

A refurb is probably better than new from an Apple store. If you still have problems get it replaced.

 

[UngratefulNinja]

Do you have push notifications enabled? I enabled mine the other day and got a lot of push notifications and it was a horrible battery drain.

 

[-aggie-]

Do you have push notifications enabled? I enabled mine the other day and got a lot of push notifications and it was a horrible battery drain.

Unless he's getting a huge amount of emails, I would doubt that's draining the battery, since he has push off for everything else. However, we'll soon know after he finishes the restore. OP, let us know how it goes. I neglected to mention before about your exchange server having problems possibly causing the drain. The only way that could be is if it was somehow constantly sending a push to your iPhone. If it was down, it wouldn't do anything.

 

[forg1vr]

I had a similar issue in the past 2 nights. My battery would go from fully charged to 30% or below in 1 single night. So last night then it lost about 10% charge per HOUR.
I got a 3gs 16gb and I only bought it a mere 2 weeks ago.

I already reset the settings, wifi, 3g and push is turned off. Essentially, I didnt change any settings when this started occurring.

Should I get it replaced or contact Apple customer care?
Should I let it run out of battery and then recharge fully? Or do a recovery?

This just sucks. Its my first apple product ever and I was happy so far...

 

[mrochester]

I've just had this happen to me. I've had the 3GS just over a week now, and it is setup identically to my 3G. Last night the 3GS had 100% charge, and this morning after not being used at all, it's got the red battery charging bar as it has completely run out of power and switched itself off. I'm trying to find out why.