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Batterygate??
- Thread starter M33-1
- Start date
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I've got my batter back to normal
Hi guys,
first off thanks for all sharing these great insights. Some stuff make me think about how I use the phone and what could be the cause of the faster battery loss.
Changes made
1*Deleted both email accounts
2 Turned off bluetooth
3*Added back Mobile me + my private domain
Than:
WiFi » On
Notifications » Manual
Location Service On for » Maps, Siri and Weather
Brightness » Auto
iCloud »*Everything ON except DOCUMENTS & DATA + iCloud Backup
Mail » Fetch New Data Off ( I like to check it when I want, not that it beeps all the time)
----
Than I charged it over night. Started at 5:30 am and lost 1% until this post, which is 8:52... I can live with 1% loss in 3 hours, while having the phone on sporadically.
---
I will experiment with putting now selected features back on / one at at time to see what will happened.
It may be DATA & Backup with iCloud. Or may be the long charge over night re-calibrated the battery. I do use use BOOST MAGIC app to tickle off the charge. Good app. But who knows for sure beside Apple.
Hope this helps.
Hi guys,
first off thanks for all sharing these great insights. Some stuff make me think about how I use the phone and what could be the cause of the faster battery loss.
Changes made
1*Deleted both email accounts
2 Turned off bluetooth
3*Added back Mobile me + my private domain
Than:
WiFi » On
Notifications » Manual
Location Service On for » Maps, Siri and Weather
Brightness » Auto
iCloud »*Everything ON except DOCUMENTS & DATA + iCloud Backup
Mail » Fetch New Data Off ( I like to check it when I want, not that it beeps all the time)
----
Than I charged it over night. Started at 5:30 am and lost 1% until this post, which is 8:52... I can live with 1% loss in 3 hours, while having the phone on sporadically.
---
I will experiment with putting now selected features back on / one at at time to see what will happened.
It may be DATA & Backup with iCloud. Or may be the long charge over night re-calibrated the battery. I do use use BOOST MAGIC app to tickle off the charge. Good app. But who knows for sure beside Apple.
Hope this helps.
Here are my before/after results for a full charge with normal usage (including an overnight) after employing the following battery-saving techniques:
1. One complete battery cycle from 100% to auto-shutoff, let sit for a couple hours, then charged all the way back up to 100% untouched before starting test.
2. Disabled notifications for everything I don't regularly use (which isn't much).
3. Disabled Ping.
4. Disabled Location Services for Time Zone Adjustment, iAds, and Diagnostics & Usage Reports.
5. Reset Network Settings.
Pretty much everything else fully on, including bluetooth, wi-fi (incl. wi-fi sync), dozens of app-specific network services, about a dozen notifications (including mail), an Exchange Account with everything on including push, an IMAP account with everything on including push, and iCloud with everything on including push (except iCloud backup).
1. One complete battery cycle from 100% to auto-shutoff, let sit for a couple hours, then charged all the way back up to 100% untouched before starting test.
2. Disabled notifications for everything I don't regularly use (which isn't much).
3. Disabled Ping.
4. Disabled Location Services for Time Zone Adjustment, iAds, and Diagnostics & Usage Reports.
5. Reset Network Settings.
Pretty much everything else fully on, including bluetooth, wi-fi (incl. wi-fi sync), dozens of app-specific network services, about a dozen notifications (including mail), an Exchange Account with everything on including push, an IMAP account with everything on including push, and iCloud with everything on including push (except iCloud backup).
I just wanted to add my experience. I was having the same battery dropping issue mentioned here with my iPhone 4S 16gb then last night I ran my battery all the way down until it turned off. I was surprised when the battery showed 1% and that it continued to stream Pandora for the next 20+ minutes. Then I charged it overnight and so far its working much better. Hope this helps someone.
OK just like everyone I've been worried about my battery as well. I decided after spending the day working on the 1000's of tweaks on the innerwebs that I, based on Oppressed's testing sequence from the Apple Store, probably do not have a bad battery. I think the culprit is I have just been PAYING TO MUCH ATTENTION TO IT!!!
I'd say your battery is just fine. You're getting pretty normal usage out of it.
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3)
Yeah that happened to me the first 2 discharges (1% for half hour)
I just want to mention again that at first I thought people were being paranoid but after having 2 nights of only a 2% discharge then last night discharging 20% I'm convinced something's up
Yeah that happened to me the first 2 discharges (1% for half hour)
I just want to mention again that at first I thought people were being paranoid but after having 2 nights of only a 2% discharge then last night discharging 20% I'm convinced something's up
They aren't allowed to give you a different color/model, period.
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All phone batteries drop a percent for every couple of minutes of web browsing. So does an iPad, Macbook, etc. Why do you feel this is abnormal?
And 6 hrs and 24 minutes of usage and nearly 19 hours of standby seems completely in line with the usage numbers I had on my old iP4. I don't think there's anything wrong with your phone at all providing you really did have over 6 hours of usage.
After my semi-failed Genius Bar Appointment yesterday, I tried some more things overnight, and was hopeful that I would see some improvement.
At 12am, 95%.
At 8am, all on standby on Wi-FI, 45%.
So I lost 50% in 8 hours with none of the big battery drain things on (Location Services, Bluetooth, Notifications, etc.). I had one exchange account that had no e-mail traffic and had polled all the required data prior to being disconnected. I've calibrated the battery twice and did a factory restore.
I can confirm what another poster said: the Genius Bar does NOT want you to do a factory restore PRIOR to visiting. I had did one just before and it made it difficult to track what had been going on. Luckily, I was still able to show the standby battery drain during the appointment.
My battery diagnostic was clean. I am now believing that the issue is iOS 5 related and is connected to Exchange accounts or the Wi-Fi radio. Why it only affected one of my five iOS devices baffles me.
At 12am, 95%.
At 8am, all on standby on Wi-FI, 45%.
So I lost 50% in 8 hours with none of the big battery drain things on (Location Services, Bluetooth, Notifications, etc.). I had one exchange account that had no e-mail traffic and had polled all the required data prior to being disconnected. I've calibrated the battery twice and did a factory restore.
I can confirm what another poster said: the Genius Bar does NOT want you to do a factory restore PRIOR to visiting. I had did one just before and it made it difficult to track what had been going on. Luckily, I was still able to show the standby battery drain during the appointment.
My battery diagnostic was clean. I am now believing that the issue is iOS 5 related and is connected to Exchange accounts or the Wi-Fi radio. Why it only affected one of my five iOS devices baffles me.
I changed two things:
1. Siri lift to talk
2. disabled find my friends.
>.<
back to iphone 4 level battery usage
1. Siri lift to talk
2. disabled find my friends.
>.<
back to iphone 4 level battery usage
Quick question - what have people done to fix the USAGE and STANDBY time that are the same?
I was told to do a restore, is this correct?
It's happened before on my friend's iPhone 4.
I was told to do a restore, is this correct?
It's happened before on my friend's iPhone 4.
I tried pressing down the lock and home button and it didn't work
hold both until you see the swipe for power off, then you'll see the screen go black, then the apple logo will appear. release buttons at that point
I also wonder whether there are certain apps that may be contributing to the issues some people are seeing. My thought is that there may be weird interactions with iOS5 and certain apps that cause excessive drain.
Has anyone who is experiencing significant drain tried removing groups of apps to see if there's an effect?
On my 4S I'm currently at 35% with Usage at 4h28m, Standby at 23h31m. Wifi, BT, 3G, iCloud, Exchange, Gmail all on.
Has anyone who is experiencing significant drain tried removing groups of apps to see if there's an effect?
On my 4S I'm currently at 35% with Usage at 4h28m, Standby at 23h31m. Wifi, BT, 3G, iCloud, Exchange, Gmail all on.
My 4S
Borrowed iPhone 4 w/ iOS 4.2.8 from my boss at work...
I asked a friend who also just got a 4S 64GB, and his results avg. 5:05
When I put my phone down on the nightstand last night it was at 50%, and when I woke up not even 6 hours later it had dropped to 15%, and I rebooted it before I put it down to make sure nothing was running in the background.
That's about 6.7% per hour just sitting on my nightstand doing nothing.
I put on a video, 100% brightness, and let it play while I had breakfast etc...
At 7% I started the lap test again, and had some very interesting results
2 - 4:21.6
3 - 6:22.8
4 - 4:22.1
5 - 4:01.6
6 - 5:04.5
7 - 5:03.9
8 - 4:03.2
9 - 6:00.8
And here's where it's really strange... at this point the battery had hit 1% remaining and I watched the timer tick for another 17+ minutes before the phone powered off... SEVENTEEN MINUTES?!
I left it off, and when I got to work plugged it in to charge with the AC adapter... I'm going to leave it on there till I leave.
The iPhone 4 tests I did with my bosses phone was started at 94% battery, so I'll do this again tonight around the same with my 4S and post back.
Borrowed iPhone 4 w/ iOS 4.2.8 from my boss at work...
I asked a friend who also just got a 4S 64GB, and his results avg. 5:05
When I put my phone down on the nightstand last night it was at 50%, and when I woke up not even 6 hours later it had dropped to 15%, and I rebooted it before I put it down to make sure nothing was running in the background.
That's about 6.7% per hour just sitting on my nightstand doing nothing.
I put on a video, 100% brightness, and let it play while I had breakfast etc...
At 7% I started the lap test again, and had some very interesting results
2 - 4:21.6
3 - 6:22.8
4 - 4:22.1
5 - 4:01.6
6 - 5:04.5
7 - 5:03.9
8 - 4:03.2
9 - 6:00.8
And here's where it's really strange... at this point the battery had hit 1% remaining and I watched the timer tick for another 17+ minutes before the phone powered off... SEVENTEEN MINUTES?!
I left it off, and when I got to work plugged it in to charge with the AC adapter... I'm going to leave it on there till I leave.
The iPhone 4 tests I did with my bosses phone was started at 94% battery, so I'll do this again tonight around the same with my 4S and post back.
Last edited:
have been up and unplugged since 0800 (about 3 hours ago) and have used the phone for two phone calls, some music, email, news, etc. Currently at 96% .
Again, all I did was change the siri lift to talk, and disabled find my friends.
my other settings are about 75% brightness, 1 minute auto lock, wifi on, bt on, siri on, 2 email accounts (gmail and me.com), a couple things open.
I was extremely disappointed with the battery until I changed these settings. It still uses more than the iPhone 4 did, but it's MUCH better now
Again, all I did was change the siri lift to talk, and disabled find my friends.
my other settings are about 75% brightness, 1 minute auto lock, wifi on, bt on, siri on, 2 email accounts (gmail and me.com), a couple things open.
I was extremely disappointed with the battery until I changed these settings. It still uses more than the iPhone 4 did, but it's MUCH better now
I was getting about 5-6 hours of battery life and decided to turn off the iCloud stuff. I just got 2 hours of usage (browsing) and still have 75% which is about what my iPhone 4 has. Now the phone should last about 7-8 hours. I think iCloud definitely hits the battery hard.
Batteries are getting hit hard on phones that don't even have iCloud accounts configured. Just throwing that out there.
My 4S
Image
Borrowed iPhone 4 w/ iOS 4.2.8 from my boss at work...
Image
I asked a friend who also just got a 4S 64GB, and his results avg. 5:05
When I put my phone down on the nightstand last night it was at 50%, and when I woke up not even 6 hours later it had dropped to 15%, and I rebooted it before I put it down to make sure nothing was running in the background.
That's about 6.7% per hour just sitting on my nightstand doing nothing.
I put on a video, 100% brightness, and let it play while I had breakfast etc...
At 7% I started the lap test again, and had some very interesting results
2 - 4:21.6
3 - 6:22.8
4 - 4:22.1
5 - 4:01.6
6 - 5:04.5
7 - 5:03.9
8 - 4:03.2
9 - 6:00.8
And here's where it's really strange... at this point the battery had hit 1% remaining and I watched the timer tick for another 17+ minutes before the phone powered off... SEVENTEEN MINUTES?!
I left it off, and when I got to work plugged it in to charge with the AC adapter... I'm going to leave it on there till I leave.
The iPhone 4 tests I did with my bosses phone was started at 94% battery, so I'll do this again tonight around the same with my 4S and post back.
The seventeen minutes at 1% is more or less normal. This morning I had 20 mins going from 100% to 99%. It is best to do the test between 80% and 20% for accurate results.
have been up and unplugged since 0800 (about 3 hours ago) and have used the phone for two phone calls, some music, email, news, etc. Currently at 96% .
Again, all I did was change the siri lift to talk, and disabled find my friends.
my other settings are about 75% brightness, 1 minute auto lock, wifi on, bt on, siri on, 2 email accounts (gmail and me.com), a couple things open.
I was extremely disappointed with the battery until I changed these settings. It still uses more than the iPhone 4 did, but it's MUCH better now
Thanks - I am currently at 94% with 30 mins usage and 3:30 standby. I have exchange push, iCloud (minus email, bookmarks, and notes) push, gmail imap manual, and turned off a lot of the GPS stuff for iAD, time, and weather. I also have disabled siri lift to talk.
I am running on wifi and decided since I was, to turn off cellular data. This could be a major factor.
Definitely not complaining about battery life now, seems to be fine but that is a good note with your find my friends.
I went ahead and disabled find my friends location as well from the settings. This is something that can easily be turned on when you actually decide to use the app. No need to have it on at all times. Thanks for the heads up.
Edit: I, on average, get and send roughly 100+ emails through my exchange push email a day.
Battery performance warrants a return
I'm returning my Sprint 4S tonight - can't abide getting less than a day standby time. I'm still using my 3G as an iPod, and I get better battery life on that even though it's getting used and the 4S isn't!
It appears to drop the most at home where Sprint's signal is sub-3G. Unfortunately, it's been like that for my wife's phone for years, so I'm not going to wait for a tower upgrade. It's on Wi-Fi so I can't see why it doesn't just use that for data instead. Maybe they'll work that out in the next few weeks, but my return window closes faster than firmware updates are issued.
Voice activated alarms are cool and all, but useless if your device shuts itself off every night.
I'm returning my Sprint 4S tonight - can't abide getting less than a day standby time. I'm still using my 3G as an iPod, and I get better battery life on that even though it's getting used and the 4S isn't!
It appears to drop the most at home where Sprint's signal is sub-3G. Unfortunately, it's been like that for my wife's phone for years, so I'm not going to wait for a tower upgrade. It's on Wi-Fi so I can't see why it doesn't just use that for data instead. Maybe they'll work that out in the next few weeks, but my return window closes faster than firmware updates are issued.
Voice activated alarms are cool and all, but useless if your device shuts itself off every night.
Agreed. I did the test yesterday at 79 to 74%, just wanted to test it again while extremely low.
I could see the battery to drain much slower from 100% to 99% but the last 1% taking 4x longer seemed strange. I am no battery expert by any means.
So yesterday all seemed good, I had reset my email accounts and the battery seemed to hold up great. This morning after 27 minutes (checked emails and twitter and moved a DVD in my netflix queue, thats it) of usage and 1.5 hours of standby I'm looking at 87%. It seems like every time I just turn on the screen just to look at the time it has dropped another percent.