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Apple Investigating Reports of Poor Battery Life for iPhone OS 3.1 Users

Yes, I've noticed 3.x reduce my battery. I used to safely get a full day out of my phone, than I'd have to charge when going to sleep.

WHEN IS BATTERY TECHNOLOGY GOING TO ADVANCE! This is STUPID! Whoever is able to develop mobile battery technology that can keep up with demands of powering high-power consumption devices with a long period of time without recharging is going to be a real RICH MAN. Right now I see this battery technology really holding back the advancement mobile devices.
 
During the last stages of the 2.0 Enterprise beta a change was made that started my battery life randomly nosediving on an original iPhone with 2003 exchange servers. I had a quite detailed bug report and the final recommendation was that the exchange servers needed a patch that was known to have helped. The whole issue had to do with the frequency of the phone and the exchange server talking. There was no desire to have the patch applied from our admins and we're still running the same Exchange 2003 today. I have this happen sometimes on my 3GS as well. It helps if I switch exchange ssl proxies sometimes. On weekends when I receive far less exchange mail my battery life is considerably improved.

I wonder if any of the users having the worst experience are connecting to Exchange 2003, 2007 or umm 2010 beta?
 
After upgrading to 3.1, if I leave 3G network on and am not in a 3G coverage area like where I work, it will kill my battery quick. I have to turn off 3G.

Now when at home, I have 3G coverage and the thing will last all weekend and some with my light usage...
 
RonD69 said:
hmmm...I'm wondering how much of the "poor battery performance" is due to increased iPhone usage of the new features.
Click to expand...

None at all. Because I used to be able to go my whole day without charging. Now I cant even get trough eight and a half hours AT work without ever touching my phone... When I get home from work and look at my phone I am in the red battery with the 20% warning on screen. About an hour to two later its dead and shuts off. Definitely a 3.1 bug somewhere.
 
Apple really needs to take a serious look at the jailbreak app MyProfiles and implement this into their OS. Being able to turn battery-hungry features such as Push, Location Services, even 3G off depending on things like time, day of week, vicinity to a wifi access point, etc is wonderful. Also being able to change alerts based on email sender/subject is another great feature that makes the iPhone more Blackberry-like.
 
Question ten is no surprise at all.

While I can't claim dramatically shorter battery life I have noticed an issue with the behaviour of the icon. It certainly is linear for one thing. Second when you get to the 20% mark there is still considerable battery life left.

In any event I'm sure Apple will resolve the issues soon.

Dave
 
i've had a similar issue after i restored as new by wiping my phone from the phone. fix was to restore as new from itunes and turn wifi off. i even noticed that the battery problems were there only when wifi was on.

it's most likely the iphone OS locking files and the upgrade or restore being screwed up

after my latest restore as new it seems battery life is a lot better than with 3.0 on my launch 3GS
 
I had some pretty serious battery problems after the last update -- for a while it seemed that battery life was drastically reduced (based on the indicator), but I think that was just a reporting problem. After a while I noticed it wouldn't appear to take a charge either, and would beep twice when I plugged it into my computer instead of the usual once... Following the advice of some blog post I found that described a similar issue way back in the OS 1.x days, I just powered the thing down (holding the top button for a while) and rebooted it, and everything fixed itself. I stopped noticing odd random bits of unresponsiveness and UI rendering weirdness after this as well.

Might be worth a shot for anybody experiencing similar issues.
 
When I first installed 3.1, the battery life on my 3GS was absolutely horrible. Typically, under 3.0.1, I'd have about 65-70% battery life left at the end of a day. Under 3.1 (with the exact same settings: Bluetooth & WiFi on, Fetch and Push OFF), I was getting 28-35% battery life left at the end of a day.

HOWEVER... I was having other problems under 3.1. Visual Voicemail stopped working and my 3G data service wasn't working properly. About 75% of the time, when I'd go to use 3G data, the phone acted like it wasn't connected to ANY data service, despite the fact that I had 4-5 bars of signal. If I reset the iPhone (hold down both home and power until I saw the Apple logo), then data would immediately start working. But, next time I went to use it same problem! I was reseting the phone multiple times per day!

Those problems prompted me to call AT&T. The service rep escalated me to level 2 where a very helpful gentlemen promptly asked me, point blank, if I had every jail broken my iPhone (NO!), or hacked the carrier settings to enable tethering. Oops... sheepishly, I admitted I had! He told me that is the source of the troubles. He said 3.1 doesn't play well with hacked iPhones (probably because AT&T and Apple want it that way). He then instructed me to reset the network settings, which didn't help (Voicemail was still dead). Next he had me do a restore from backup. That still didn't help. Finally, he told me the only thing that would work was a restore as a new iPhone and then manually reinstall all of my music/photos/apps and manually reset all of my preferred settings! This did not make me happy! But who was to blame besides myself?! I'm man enough to admit when I did something I shouldn't have and spend the better part of a day restoring the iPhone as a new phone.

When I was done, my iPhone is working better than before 3.1! It's seems snappier than even under 3.0! I have had ZERO problems with Voicemail. My data service ALWAYS works correctly and, to my "seat of the pants" measuring method, seems faster then ever. And, guess what?.... At the end of a day, I now have between 65-70% of battery life left!

Now, I'm not suggesting that everyone having reduced battery life post-3.1 has done any hacking on their iPhone. But, let's face it, there is a pretty high percentage of folks in these forums that HAVE hacked their iPhone. If you are one of them, and you installed 3.1 over the hack, you just might be having problems because of the hack.

Mark
 
I've had to reboot a number of times as well....here's hoping that this survey gives them the data they need to push an update out fast.
 
Who knew?

Who knew that battery life on the 3gs could get any worse?
I wish they would put in a replaceable battery that is non-intrusive similar to the way the sim card is inserted into the iPhone. Yes, I say THE iPhone because calling it simple 'iPhone' is so douchy sounding. :eek:
 
This is good news. I typically have BT and WiFi turned off on my iPhone and have noticed an appalling decrease in battery life throughout the day. It barely makes it to the end - which is quite unusual. When 3.0 was installed, battery life was fine - no complaints at all. 3.1 seemed to be the culprit.

P.S. I've never hacked my iPhone either. I'm a GOOD little Apple fanboy. :)
 
rishey said:
Who knew that battery life on the 3gs could get any worse?
I wish they would put in a replaceable battery that is non-intrusive similar to the way the sim card is inserted into the iPhone. Yes, I say THE iPhone because calling it simple 'iPhone' is so douchy sounding. :eek:
Click to expand...
if they have a removable battery i'd not complain as much! :mad: but having to plug in to charge all the time is ridiculous when i travel to client sites. it's so infuriating...i love my iphone but it lasts like 5 minutes.
 
How about pre-3.1 users??? I got my 3Gs on launch day and the battery life pretty much sucks. I guess I should take my brother-in-law's lead and turn mine in @ the Apple Store for a new one. This is crazy. Left the house @ 100% at 7am. It's now 11:49am and after some very LIGHT usage I'm at 68% !

I shudder to think what this phone's battery life would be if I upgraded to 3.1. :eek:

I guess I'll make the trip this weekend to get a replacement. I hope it's not a refurb. :rolleyes:
 
bubba*nix said:
Apple really needs to take a serious look at the jailbreak app MyProfiles and implement this into their OS. Being able to turn battery-hungry features such as Push, Location Services, even 3G off depending on things like time, day of week, vicinity to a wifi access point, etc is wonderful. Also being able to change alerts based on email sender/subject is another great feature that makes the iPhone more Blackberry-like.
Click to expand...

I totally agree... It is something I miss from my SE phones, being able to adjust ringtone profiles based upon time of day etc. Hopefully Apple will implement something like this soon and add more powerful features such as the toggling of 3G etc to said profiles.
 
Apple's obsession with an ultra-thin phone is going eventually hurt their sales. With all the emerging technologies, Apple would be far better off by making the next generation device thicker so as to incorporate a larger battery! The real world battery life while using GPS and Bluetooth will flat-line your device in no time. The Palm Pre and RIM, slams the iPhone hands down. BTW: I love my iPhone, MacPro, AEBS, MacBook Pro, etc.
Regards, :apple:
 
Digital Dude said:
Apple's obsession with an ultra-thin phone is going eventually hurt their sales. With all the emerging technologies, Apple would be far better off by making the next generation device thicker so as to incorporate a larger battery! The real world battery life while using GPS and Bluetooth will flat-line your device in no time. The Palm Pre and RIM, slams the iPhone hands down. BTW: I love my iPhone, MacPro, AEBS, MacBook Pro, etc.
Regards, :apple:
Click to expand...

Hogwash on the Palm Pre! One of my friends has a Palm Pre and its battery life is FAR worse than any iPhone. He hates the damn thing because of the terrible battery life.

My iPhone has been on and unplugged from power for just over an hour this morning. I've checked E-mail (manually) twice, changed my Voicemail greeting (about 10 recordings before I finally settled on one to send to my voicemail), and I've taken one brief telephone call. Battery life is still at 99%.

Mark
 
I subscribed to a data plan about the same time as I got 3.1 so I thought my battery was dying faster because of the data transfer. Even though I turned Wi-Fi off, it didn't seem to change it's performance. Never really thought that it could be the software. My battery's always good until it hits about 70% and then it just drops from there to 20% in about half the time it took for the first 30%.

It'll be interesting to see what's gained from this. Hopefully it'll improve my battery life.
 
mm1250 said:
Yes, I've noticed 3.x reduce my battery. I used to safely get a full day out of my phone, than I'd have to charge when going to sleep.

WHEN IS BATTERY TECHNOLOGY GOING TO ADVANCE! This is STUPID! Whoever is able to develop mobile battery technology that can keep up with demands of powering high-power consumption devices with a long period of time without recharging is going to be a real RICH MAN. Right now I see this battery technology really holding back the advancement mobile devices.
Click to expand...

This comment really made me jump!!! I'm a researcher in energy storage alternatives for mobile devices such as direct alcohol fuel cells and microfluidic fuel cells. Buddy, believe me.. we're working very hard to find a solution. It's true Li batteries are on the limit and so far is the best we have, but well, I can tell you.. if we succeed, talking about those who work on this field, you will have battery life at least 11 times of what you have know. It's just a matter of time.
 
iMouse said:
I'm beginning to wonder if this is either poor reporting by the battery indicator or an issue of "junk" being left over from upgrading the OS.

I have no problems whatsoever with 3.1 on my 1st gen iPhone. Actually, while battery life has stayed relatively on par with 3.0, the performance of my phone has been better. On 3.0, I would encounter short periods of time where the phone would hang while it checked for mail in the background. This appears to have been fixed with 3.1.

Also, my wife's 3GS is not experiencing any of these battery issues as well.


Has anyone who has restored their phone in DFU mode encountered similar reported issues with battery on 3.1?
Click to expand...

Nope.. I've done full restores a couple of times, including DFU... Same issues. If I roll back to 3.0, problems go away.
 
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