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Apple Confirms Battery Life Issues With iOS 5, Software Update Coming

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A402 Safari/7534.48.3)

My battery actually seem worse after installing 5.0.1.

Lost about 8% now in one hour of light usage.

Now either I still have the problem or it is because I have not calibrated the battery after DFU reseting (if batt calibrating is whiped after reformating).
 
Fesan said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A402 Safari/7534.48.3)

My battery actually seem worse after installing 5.0.1.

Lost about 8% now in one hour of light usage.

Now either I still have the problem or it is because I have not calibrated the battery after DFU reseting (if batt calibrating is whiped after reformating).
Click to expand...

Great! That sucks.
 
Dont seed it to the devs send it out to us 4S user. Turned off almost everything and the battery still drains to quickly. Apple need to fix this real quickly:mad:
 
Just to give an update for those interested.

I did some testing yesterday on iOS5 with my 4s and 4, both activated. Took some notes. Then installed iOS5.0.1 and mimicked my usage as best I could. The one difference is that I had previously turned off Set Time Zone and I turned that back on for the iOS5.0.1 test. You can read my results below, which are still a WIP, but safe to say battery improved significantly on both devices. I will say that your usage of the device of course has an impact on battery drain. For example, sitting on wifi vs 3G while various notifications came in drains the battery at a faster rate on 3G. So you really need to pay attention to everything when testing. Here are some of my results.

Not going to go through all my settings. But phone is setup as a power user. All notifications on lock screen and home screen. 3 push accounts and 2 manual. Wifi always on. Bluetooth used when needed.

Net results are that the new update improves usage time by about 25-30% and standby usage time by about 35%.
 
Here is the status after three hours with 5.0.1:

The phone says 1hr usage and 2hrs 40min standby since last full charge and of that usage about 15 mins is surfing on 3g. 5 mins surfing on wifi. 20mins listening to music and 5 mins phonecall. Rest is just checking settings etc.

My battery percentage shows 78% at the moment. I took it out of the charger at around 0930 and it is 1149 now. Just during a 3minute phonecall it dropped from 80 to 78%.

I did a battery calibration (let the phone die out then charge to 100% in one go) yesterday but have DFU reset it a couple of times since then trying to fix the battery problem. I don't know if this affects the battery calibration if so it might be that the phone will go to 1% fast and then remain there for some time.

The battery drain feels alittle different since installing 5.0.1, it seems to drain less during standby and more during use but in total I'd say I got less batterytime than before 5.0.1. This might also just be coincidence. Sufice to say I have not gotten a boost in battery life if the percentage represents real battery usage, If it is because of calibration issues it is impossible to say if things are better. Will let you know when my phone hits 1% or dies out (which should'nt take long:p).
 
MattMJB0188 said:
Does anyone think its possible Apple will include the 3G on/off button in this update??? I have a much better signal when its EDGE only.
Click to expand...

The 3G button is still there, it's availability is just set by the carrier settings file that your network provides. Complain to them that they've turned it off. O2 users in the UK for example still have the button.

Phazer
 
I have two iPhones, an iPhone 4 & 4s. The 4s battery life is quite poor, it uses twice as much juice doing the same tasks as the original iPhone 4 running iOS 4.

Since updating my iPhone 4 to iOS 5, the battery life is appalling. It's 11.25am now, I took it off charge at about 6am. Since then I've sent a few SMS's, 1 picture message and had about 30 mins internet browsing on 3G (not WLAN) and it's down to 60% already.
 
The Phazer said:
The 3G button is still there, it's availability is just set by the carrier settings file that your network provides. Complain to them that they've turned it off. O2 users in the UK for example still have the button.

Phazer
Click to expand...

Not on my one, is you 4s bought in an o2 contract? Mine isn't and that is why I'm asking.
 
5.0.1 doesn't do a huge amount. It seems like they slowed the drain down by a little bit but soon as you start doing anything, the battery drain kicks in but not as fast as before. Still hugely poor compared to iOS4. Hopefully they fix it completely for the public release, after all 5.0.1 is just beta
 
My guess is that the battery problem with 4S is releated to how the antennas cooperate to achive the best signal possible. Maybe this feature has a bug in iOS 5.0 on 4S which leaves it "turned on" all the time..

Will try the 5.0.1 when I get home. Can't be worse than it's now.
 
poor apple... first antenna gate now... battery gate.. i wonder if they will hire a person to oversee proper product testing??
 
Qramohn said:
Will try the 5.0.1 when I get home. Can't be worse than it's now.
Click to expand...

Guess what, it can:)

Well, in standby mine got alittlebit better but when using it drains like crazy. Mine dropped 2% from a 3 minute phonecall on 5.0.1.

Going to revert to 5.0 now to test alittlebit more, but so far my verdict on 5.0.1 is that it is worse.
 
Qramohn said:
My guess is that the battery problem with 4S is releated to how the antennas cooperate to achive the best signal possible. Maybe this feature has a bug in iOS 5.0 on 4S which leaves it "turned on" all the time..

Will try the 5.0.1 when I get home. Can't be worse than it's now.
Click to expand...

I and several posters have stated that they get great battery life with their 4S. That doesn't mean there isn't a specific problem with some users, but I'd say you're ignoring evidence and posting a theory with poor basis.

In fact, it is my STRONG hunch that the 4S has far better power efficiency with regard to radio Tx and Rx.
 
I am asstonished that with all their testing before releasing the 4S no one complained of battery issues or that they even noticed anything strange, seems to me they should select about 1,000 customers to release the phones to, so they can do real world testing, why is it the general public that finds these issues and not one Apple employee noticed this.

I am not blaming just Apple, it seems to be the case with all MFG's, they need to get devices in the hands of the General public for real world testing, otherwise we have to wait for fixes after the release of a product, seems like not enough Testing is going on behind the scenes.
 
Wicked1 said:
I am asstonished that with all their testing before releasing the 4S no one complained of battery issues or that they even noticed anything strange, seems to me they should select about 1,000 customers to release the phones to, so they can do real world testing, why is it the general public that finds these issues and not one Apple employee noticed this.

I am not blaming just Apple, it seems to be the case with all MFG's, they need to get devices in the hands of the General public for real world testing, otherwise we have to wait for fixes after the release of a product, seems like not enough Testing is going on behind the scenes.
Click to expand...

Apple was well aware if the issue. They don't care. Still plenty if people who don't care. It's the heavy users who are hurting here.
 
KPOM said:
To be fair, it doesn't affect everyone, and not everyone it affects will notice and report it. Anyway, it's nice to see Apple getting out in front of this before it had a chance to turn into another "Antennagate" (I hate the overuse of the suffix "-gate").
Click to expand...

But the difference between this and "Antennagate" is that the battery issue is a legitimate problem as opposed to a bunch of hipsters complaining about bad signal reception despite living in hovels under elevated train tracks in Brooklyn.
 
Airplay issue

Hopefully this will resolve the airplay issue on the 4S.

Seems that when I ever I am using airplay from my 4s to my ihome iW1 and I get a TKIP re-key the whole network goes down for a period of time and this is using an Airport Express.
 
Hasty development

No wonder Apple didn't spend sufficient time testing, given the very quick time-to-market from the launch of iPhone 4 to 4S...:)
 
I believe the update fix from apple whit the 5.0.1 FW will resolve the standby drains that many people suffer around, but will not do anything for the people like me who complain not from standby drain, but from exagerated usage drain, like texting and browsing excessive drain, and why? because this is essencially the same battery from the iphone4 but being drained by hungry dual core processor instead of a much slower single core A4 cpu from i4.

Since apple didnt work on any visual changes from iphone4 to the 4s they had time to develop a better and stronger battery to deal whit the dual core cpu, it feels like they stuck a ferrari engine in a renault 5 chassis, it just cant handle the stress and fall appart. or could create some kind of software activating dual core usage just for stress situations like 3d gaming or other cpu stress situations, no need for dual core speed for texting and other basic functions imo. even a dual/single core enable/disable button would be nice, just like a 3g enable/disable also.

Try to receive and send 15 text messages from an iphone 4 and from a iphone 4s, iphone 4 should drain around 2% or less and the iphone 4s you can imagine something between 5% and 10% in worst case. yeah sure, the standby time is fine,i manage to keep at 100% for 4/5hours in standby but as soon as i start to use it the battery just falls appart in basic actions like sending texts, and just browsing around. it doesnt do anything for me having a phone is these conditions. the only thing i can consider normal in this iphone 4s is listening to music, the drain is pretty normal doing this in airplane mode.

I guess i will have to suck it up till a new iphone is released next year, either that or go back to the iphone 4
 
Look, its OBVIOUS, the 4S will not get same battery life as 4. The question is what is acceptable for the bump in specs. People can't complain the iPhone is not keeping up to snuff spec wise with Android but then complain when Apple bumps specs but battery suffers. Any phone going from single to dual core will eat more battery. But some of these claims of excessive battery drain are ridiculous. Not ridiculous in that they are happening but ridiculous in that clearly the settings are not normal (or the install is corrupt). To prove this point, i have set up my phone as new and installed back all my apps, photos and music. If someone else wants to test phone to phone, then do the same, and then i am happy to do a simple test. Set all our location and notification settings the same. Then:

1) Start Pandora in the background on wifi
2) We can iMessage back and forth for 10 minutes straight.

There is no way the phone battery life drops more than 5%.
 
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