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Battery Usage

Some potential issues for bad battery life are:

  1. Apps that use your GPS at all times
  2. Areas with bad or no signal strength
I had a coworker claim his iPhone 5 had a horrible battery compared to his iPhone 4. I told him to check which apps were using the GPS in Settings and it turns out the OKCupid app had some sort of feature turned on that was continuously pinging the GPS.
 
CSpackler said:
My battery really hangs in there.

This is lots of wifi browsing, some calls, push emails, some video streaming, some LTE, plenty of notifications, playing with various apps. Brightness at 60%. All radios on except bluetooth. No music though. Restored as new.

Let the battery discharge until the phone turns itself off. Then charge fully while the phone is off (you'll have to manually do this as it turns back on automatically). Charging while off prevents parasitic load, or when the battery and phone are vying for power and the battery gets confused where 100% should be.
Click to expand...

This is amazing. I can't believe it
 
Some of these remedies to max out your battery are bunk.

My 5 is getting better battery life than my 4S. I am on LTE all day and return home with no less than 50% remaining when it goes back on the charger for the night.

Never done anything to my battery, did not even charge it the morning it arrived till bedtime and it was still at 35%.
 
CSpackler said:
My battery really hangs in there.

This is lots of wifi browsing, some calls, push emails, some video streaming, some LTE, plenty of notifications, playing with various apps. Brightness at 60%. All radios on except bluetooth. No music though. Restored as new.

Let the battery discharge until the phone turns itself off. Then charge fully while the phone is off (you'll have to manually do this as it turns back on automatically). Charging while off prevents parasitic load, or when the battery and phone are vying for power and the battery gets confused where 100% should be.
Click to expand...

ok so if it is off how do you tell when it is done charging? cause mine is off and i hit the home button and no battery indicator comes on. do i have to turn it off and on to check the status of the charge?
 
really happy right now! for whatever reason my battery usage improved a lot today!! I was only getting 6+ hours and today I hit over 9!! No idea why.

21dln5g.jpg


I have no idea what I did or why!
 
:confused:


I streamed iHeart radio for 2 hours (7am-9am), very light browsing, lots of imo messages back and forth (7am-930am), 30 min phone call....

Battery was at 16% by 1230 in the afternoon..............Fair?:confused:
 
I've been getting terrible battery life, almost half what my 4S gets. I turned off LTE in settings today and its MUCH improved! We don't have LTE here yet, so I wonder if the phone was wasting power searching in vain for LTE?
 
golfesv said:
ok so if it is off how do you tell when it is done charging? cause mine is off and i hit the home button and no battery indicator comes on. do i have to turn it off and on to check the status of the charge?
Click to expand...

Just give it a few hours in the wall charger. The phone will be warm to the touch while it's charging. When it stops it'll cool off.
 
CSpackler said:
My battery really hangs in there.

This is lots of wifi browsing, some calls, push emails, some video streaming, some LTE, plenty of notifications, playing with various apps. Brightness at 60%. All radios on except bluetooth. No music though. Restored as new.

Let the battery discharge until the phone turns itself off. Then charge fully while the phone is off (you'll have to manually do this as it turns back on automatically). Charging while off prevents parasitic load, or when the battery and phone are vying for power and the battery gets confused where 100% should be.
Click to expand...

This seems to have worked for me. Before this, I was getting 5 hours usage, 10 hours standby. I have all radios on except for Bluetooth, Location services are on, brightness at 50%. I used pandora streaming from wifi for 7 hours, 30 min FaceTime call, 30 minutes web surfing, 30 minutes of watching my webcam, a few phone calls and 10 texts. This battery is a workhorse. Wow :D Much better than my 4s.
 

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caliman said:
This seems to have worked for me. Before this, I was getting 5 hours usage, 10 hours standby. I have all radios on except for Bluetooth, Location services are on, brightness at 50%. I used pandora streaming from wifi for 7 hours, 30 min FaceTime call, 30 minutes web surfing, 30 minutes of watching my webcam, a few phone calls and 10 texts. This battery is a workhorse. Wow :D Much better than my 4s.
Click to expand...

Glad it worked. If anyone else wants to try this, report back.
 
As of this writing my battery usage is insanely good.

9/26
38% remaining
Usage: 8 hours, 37 minutes
Standby: 22 hours, 51 minutes

100% at 10pm, yesterday (9/25)

I did set my iPhone as "set as new" when I first got it.
WiFi on
4G for most of the day (no LTE in my area)
Bluetooth off
Auto-Brightness off, set as halfway
Push/Notifications on
Browsing, texting, a few phone calls, e-mail, facebook, twitter, music throughout the day.

This is much better than my iPhone 4 which lasted 4 hours and I had to charge once or twice a day. I'll edit with a picture in a second.
 
CSpackler said:
Just give it a few hours in the wall charger. The phone will be warm to the touch while it's charging. When it stops it'll cool off.
Click to expand...

Really? So once it's cool it's done charging? Hmmm ok so is it best to charge it when it's off completely?
 
CSpackler said:
Let the battery discharge until the phone turns itself off. Then charge fully while the phone is off (you'll have to manually do this as it turns back on automatically). Charging while off prevents parasitic load, or when the battery and phone are vying for power and the battery gets confused where 100% should be.
Click to expand...

i'll give this a try and see how it goes.
 
CSpackler said:
My battery really hangs in there.

This is lots of wifi browsing, some calls, push emails, some video streaming, some LTE, plenty of notifications, playing with various apps. Brightness at 60%. All radios on except bluetooth. No music though. Restored as new.

Let the battery discharge until the phone turns itself off. Then charge fully while the phone is off (you'll have to manually do this as it turns back on automatically). Charging while off prevents parasitic load, or when the battery and phone are vying for power and the battery gets confused where 100% should be.
Click to expand...

Hey CSpackler, thanks for this suggestion and is exactly what battery university says. But how do you charge while the phone is off? ios6 automatically turns back on? Should i charge it on airplane mode. thanks!
 
The culprit really does seem to be low signal areas. Maybe a software fix could help.

I notice that at work, where I have terrible service and the phone constnatly shifts from LTE to 3g to o, my battery goes down quicker than expected but I noticed that yesterday, when i was home and had a constant LTE connection AND wi-fi enabled the battery wouldn't really go down much. I was doing some browsing for wallpapers on this website while on it and it basically stayed at 98%.

It really does seem like the biggest problem is the consnat searching for a signal in a low signal area.

That doesn't excuse some of theo ther issues though as it does seem like certain people are having actual, legit battery issues even when everything is turned off.
 
diamond3 said:
Oh boy, I'm getting frustrated with this iPhone 5. I've been thinking it might be because I am using it more, but after today I know that isn't the case. I am probably going to restore back to the original iOS and then add the accounts, apps, music etc like it was a new phone instead of restoring from backup.

There is something crazy going on. I've got wifi on, bluetooth off, was mostly in wifi range, watched about 15 min of video, streamed pandora for maybe 30 mins (20 over 3g, 10 wifi), checked twitter a few times, talked on the phone for maybe 15 min total, texted people and other normal use. I've closed all my apps in the dock and downloaded sysstatslite from the app store.
If it truly is accurate, my phone CPU is around 80-85% being used all the time. It's a free app, so if anyone wants to try it out and let me know what they are getting, I'd be really interested.
Click to expand...


I have been using systatslite since the iPhone 3G it works well for diagnosing stuff like this. I started using it one day when my 3G started to run hot and the battery was draining like mad. Installed the app and found that the CPU was being used at a high percentage. Ended all apps, still happening so i figured it was something on line. Started turning stuff off one service at a time. Isolated it to the push service from my work email. Deleted account and recreated and fixed it.

On my iPhone5 I am at 97-98% free CPU when it is sitting idle on my desk so most likely something is continually pinging the cloud for some reason. Start manually working through services by turning them on and off until you find the culprit. Earlier this week I found that iheartradio is using nearly 50% of my CPU and draining the battery while Pandora only uses about 5%.
 
zorinlynx said:
If you run Skype, make sure you're not logged into it all the time. Skype is a chatty protocol and it will drain your battery fairly quickly if you stay logged in.
Click to expand...

Just wanted to thank you for this suggestion. My usage has been way up despite not using my phone a third of what was stated. Had Skype online but rarely use it. Turned it off and have had a VAST improvement this morning.
 
I was happy with this... I was trying to ware down the battery as fast as I could (without wasting my data).

So I had Turn by Turn GPS running, netflix streaming, and my bluetooth connected to a Bose Sound link for over an hour of that time. So I am happy with the results.

Also: For about 30-40 minutes of that, I was streaming MLB Gameday for the Cardinals using the MLB App on LTE as well.
 

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Just curious but could another culprit be using a restore from an old backup? I noticed that I used to have bad battery life on my iphone 4 and I'm wondering if settings carried over to the iphone 5 that may cause bad battery.

To be honest, I'm not even sure if my battery is that bad....I'm currently trying to run the tests that a lot of people on here have recommended. I have noticed that it drains much quicker when i'm in a low signal area though.

I don't want to restore to a new phone since I have everything set up just the way I like ti and I don't want to lose all my settings, accounts, saved data files, etc.
 
CSpackler said:
Glad it worked. If anyone else wants to try this, report back.
Click to expand...

I'm going to try this tonight as well. I've run the battery down twice to the point where the phone shut off, but I didn't manually turn the phone back off once I started re-charging. So I will try that tonight.

I don't think I'm getting horrible battery life... Seems to be pretty average to me. So far my average is about 7 hrs usage, 13.5 hours standby when not connected to wifi at all that day, and 7.5 hours usage, 15.5 hours standby when I do connect to wifi while at work (3G after that). I've been working it pretty hard since I got it and it's still lasting me until the time I go to bed at night. So I shouldn't complain. I'm just trying to see if I can squeeze out a little more.

I'll be going out of town this weekend to an area where reception is very very spotty so it will be interesting to see how the battery lasts during that time.
 
Unfortunately I'm noticing poor battery right after the move to iOS 6.

I used to get this consistently:

3e8atyqe.jpg


a8ymy2e7.jpg


Now I get

age9yvyn.jpg


And I'm heading the same way today. So I lost about an hour of battery life. I didn't think it was good to begin with but it's certainly worse.
 
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