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Battery life horrendous: can't make it through the day

Mr. Giver '94

Mr. Giver '94

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 2, 2008
1,815
0
London
I got this phone in September. I'm having such terrible battery life it's not even funny. On a normal day I'll charge it through the night and unplug it to take it to school at around 8 am. When I get home at 3:30 battery is at 20% from normal use. Today I've used my phone for 3 hours for texting music and purchasing one song on itunes. It's now showing 10%. Is my phone the issue. I had brightness at 50% and had wifi and location services off. I'm frustrated because it's impossible to make it throgb a day without plugging it in as soon as I get home. I'd appreciate some advice n how to go about dealing with this. Should I try to get a replacement?
 
Mr. Giver '94 said:
I got this phone in September. I'm having such terrible battery life it's not even funny. On a normal day I'll charge it through the night and unplug it to take it to school at around 8 am. When I get home at 3:30 battery is at 20% from normal use. Today I've used my phone for 3 hours for texting music and purchasing one song on itunes. It's now showing 10%. Is my phone the issue. I had brightness at 50% and had wifi and location services off. I'm frustrated because it's impossible to make it throgb a day without plugging it in as soon as I get home. I'd appreciate some advice n how to go about dealing with this. Should I try to get a replacement?
Click to expand...

It's the phone, I use my phone all day. When I come home at 5 it's still at 80% or higher even after being used for hours. And not just in standby.

Are you on 2.2.1 or 3.0?
 
So all you did was listen to music for 3 hours, txt a bit, surf a bit, buy a song from itunes and just generally had your phone around? And it doesn't last a day? Take it to an Apple store, something's wrong with your phone.

Or, if you're feeling industrious, I suppose you could give your battery a good cycle (full recharge, full drain) and perform a fresh restore and see if that corrects the behaviour.
 
cellocello said:
So all you did was listen to music for 3 hours, txt a bit, surf a bit, buy a song from itunes and just generally had your phone around? And it doesn't last a day? Take it to an Apple store, something's wrong with your phone.
Click to expand...

Yep. That's all I did. Thankfully someone had a charger with them. I will be taking it to the store for a replacement. I'm running 2.2.1

Thanks for the help. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't something I've been doing wrong.
 
More then likely it is your iPhone. When I purchased my classic on iDay...I had the same problem and sent it in. The tests resulted in bad WiFi antenna and bad battery, they sent me a new one.

With my 3G, I have had great performance based on my use habits; however, with the 3.0 beta release, I started having major problems. Just in one day my phone wore the battery out 3 times. I knew it could not be the phone and that something was not right. I removed every single 3rd party app, charged it up and started my testing. Battery life returned to normal. I started putting the 3rd party apps back on, one at a time, every 6 hours and found the culprit. It was the Google Mobile App. Once activated it was running ALL the time keeping Safari open and running even in sleep.

I recommend that you remove all apps and wait 24 hours to see if performance returns to normal. If it does, its not the phone but a bad 3rd party app. If it doesn't then its your phone and you need to get it exchanged.

My battery test results are HERE on page one at the bottom of entry one.

Hope that helps.
 
Mr. Giver '94 said:
Yep. That's all I did. Thankfully someone had a charger with them. I will be taking it to the store for a replacement. I'm running 2.2.1

Thanks for the help. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't something I've been doing wrong.
Click to expand...

Nope. Sounds like you've been using your phone pretty normally to me; you should be able to easily last more than one 24 hour period with that usage.
 
Try this for longer battery life

Under settings

Turn OFF wifi
Turn OFF fetch new data
Turn brightness is about half way


Under General
Turn OFF bluetooth
Turn OFF location services if you are not using it

oh wait you did most of that
nevermind ha
 
A few things:

Have you calibrated your battery yet?
What firmware are you on?
Is your brightness all the way up?
Do you have keyboard clicks turned on?
 
The iphone's battery indiacatior might be out of calabration, my phone did this before, it will go from 100% to 10% pretty fast, but from 10% to shut off, it last pretty long.
 
As mentioned above, I would try a restore. Something seems to be out of wack and perhaps the battery meter is off. Don't worry, all your stuff is backed up in iTunes. When I got my iPhone 2 weeks ago, I restored everything from my iPod touch to my iPhone without a hitch after initially doing a restore of the OS in prep for jailbreaking.
 
cbr900rr said:
The iphone's battery indiacatior might be out of calabration, my phone did this before, it will go from 100% to 10% pretty fast, but from 10% to shut off, it last pretty long.
Click to expand...

abercrombie said:
As mentioned above, I would try a restore. Something seems to be out of wack and perhaps the battery meter is off. Don't worry, all your stuff is backed up in iTunes. When I got my iPhone 2 weeks ago, I restored everything from my iPod touch to my iPhone without a hitch after initially doing a restore of the OS in prep for jailbreaking.
Click to expand...

I will try this, but i have restored recently and the 10% to zero lasted for only about 20 minutes.
 
Roessnakhan said:
Is that hard to believe? I'll listen to music for about five hours straight when I'm at work.
Click to expand...

Totally agree...I listen to music an average of 3-5 hours a day. Depending on what mode I use, determines battery usage. If you are using streaming music sources were your music is being pulled and buffered then your battery life is going to suffer. This battery usage is app dependant...some require more battery then others. If you use the iPod then battery use is very very low. Add bluetooth headphones increases battery use while wired headphones requires nothing.

I use the iPod app with a little supplemental streaming from ooTunes or Pandora and my battery still lasts over almost 48 hours.

If I am at my desk then I listen with it plugged in so that when I leave...full fresh power. Its called power management. If you are by a charging station, why strain the battery? Plug it in, recharge and use live power to perform until your ready to go. Once a month let the sucker drain all the way out just to keep things moving around.

So many ways to manage battery power.
 
Got to be your phone.

So far this week I've listened to music on the bus into work in the morning and back home in the evening - an hour each way.

During the day, 3g is on, wifi and location services off, manually check for email. I've surfed for about 1/2 hour all told and bought a couple songs via 3g.

Texted about 40-50 times and phoned a few peeps for about 1/2 hour.

My battery is showing right now at 48% and I last charged it Sunday night.

This all sounds great - but I do turn my phone off when I go to bed, so its not on from about 11-6 in the morning.
 
Wow I'm so surprised b the responses - my battery is at 10% before 1pm most days if I make more than a couple long calls. I'm on the Internet on it often but not anything I would think is an unusual amount.. Yet when I asked about it at the Genius Bar the guy kinda laughed and was like yep, iPhone gets about 6 hours max.... So I thought this is just normal????
 
spj123 said:
Wow I'm so surprised b the responses - my battery is at 10% before 1pm most days if I make more than a couple long calls. I'm on the Internet on it often but not anything I would think is an unusual amount.. Yet when I asked about it at the Genius Bar the guy kinda laughed and was like yep, iPhone gets about 6 hours max.... So I thought this is just normal????
Click to expand...

10% by 1PM? Damn g.

Like I said above, unless you're talking straight up on your phone for 6 hours, you should generally be able to bridge a 24 hour time period in most cases.
 
Listening to music and making calls and sending texts seems to make naff all difference to the battery in my experience.

Surfing the internet is by far the biggest drain.
 
About 5 Hours of use over ~48 hours of standby. Sometimes that stretches out to ~60 hours standby, but always seems to be around 5 hours of use.
 
You don't have an application that is not closing properly do you? I had the same problem, bought an app called Freememory and lo and behold if I free memory before I charge, the charge lasts is about 70-80% at the end of the day. I had a rogue app that wouldn't close, so it would constantly chew up the battery maintaining itself in memory. You may also just want to reboot the phone after a fresh charge to see if that helps increase battery life and may eliminate a possible rogue app from residing in memory.
 
To the OP: what kind of third party apps do you use? I bet one of them is buggy and is draining the battery.
 
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