Batterygate??

[username008]

Not to point out the obvious, but maybe some simple math can provide a little insight to those who have no idea what to expect?

These numbers are no way an absolute, but for all the people posting their stats and asking "is this good?", perhaps this may give you an approximate indication of your battery's performance.

Apple states:

3G usage time = 7h
Standby = 200h

From the Apple Website:

Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery
Charging via USB to computer system or power adapter
Talk time: Up to 8 hours on 3G, up to 14 hours on 2G (GSM)
Standby time: Up to 200 hours
Internet use: Up to 6 hours on 3G, up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi
Video playback: Up to 10 hours
Audio playback: Up to 40 hours

Only up to 6 hours unfortunately

 

[c3m]

Did most of you did a restore from your previous phone? or did a fresh start?

I noticed that my battery drained really fast (ie: drained 30% of battery in 2 hours with on/off texting) when I did a restore using my iPhone 4 backup. Usage wasn't showing up even with 100% battery and the cellular timer showed up as my iPhone 4 timer instead of zero (talk time).

Since I can't stand the battery, I decided to do a wipe on the phone and start fresh and charged it to 100%. Everyone seem normal now.

So far 71% Battery left

Usage: 2 hours 35 minutes
Standby: 16 hours

I have these on 24/7 (Notification, Siri, iCloud: Contact, Calender, Reminder, Bluetooth, Wifi, 3G) I'm also using Find Friends and Mail in the background

I'm not turning off options to make my battery life better because I don't believe in altering my normal usage of the iPhone to compensate the battery.

 

[trouble747]

I think I'll wait a bit to see if a software fix emerges. I was constantly restoring my 3GS to deal with problems, and I hate losing all of my app data over and over.

 

[kumquat]

My battery drains about a percent a minute when in use. The only thing I have turned on is my network data connection. Emails are set to manually push. I fully close down each app after use. The phone is, for all intents and purposes, completely unusable. I activated it as a new phone and have not even opened iTunes, iCloud or Siri. How long do those of us who pre-ordered have to return it? I'm hoping a fix arrives before whatever that date may be, but there's no way I can keep this phone which essentially has only a smidge more than an hour and a half of active battery life.

 

[scousers]

Battery is much better today.... no reason why, all my settings are still the same. Wifi on, location services on for maps, siri, find my phone, etc., email push on 2 accounts, icloud on, photostream on.

Still 88% left after:

Usage 1h 0m
Standby 3h 14m

Usage has been mostly siri

 

[noTe on iPhone]

From the Apple Website:

Built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery
Charging via USB to computer system or power adapter
Talk time: Up to 8 hours on 3G, up to 14 hours on 2G (GSM)
Standby time: Up to 200 hours
Internet use: Up to 6 hours on 3G, up to 9 hours on Wi-Fi
Video playback: Up to 10 hours
Audio playback: Up to 40 hours

Only up to 6 hours unfortunately

I don't even get 6 hours of stand by time.

 

[Oppressed]

Can anyone post that after they got an Apple store to replace their phone that they could see significant improvement?

Also I wish we had set up a poll to see how many people were experiencing this to see how wide spread it is.

 

[Civic Minded]

Can anyone post that after they got an Apple store to replace their phone that they could see significant improvement?

Also I wish we had set up a poll to see how many people were experiencing this to see how wide spread it is.

Already posted my results earlier, but basically, no. Exchanging my first 4S for this one made zero difference whatsoever. My phone has been off the charger for about 4 1/2 hours and it's already down to 40%. Everything off, very light usage. So disappointing, especially since I've already sold my old iPhone 4.

 

[kumquat]

Also I wish we had set up a poll to see how many people were experiencing this to see how wide spread it is.

Could we not start a poll now?

 

[Oppressed]

Already posted my results earlier, but basically, no. Exchanging my first 4S for this one made zero difference whatsoever. My phone has been off the charger for about 4 1/2 hours and it's already down to 40%. Everything off, very light usage. So disappointing, especially since I've already sold my old iPhone 4.

Thanks for the rely and I would love to hear from others as well before I decide that I may have to come to peace with this issue.

 

[leesam]

I did a full restore, 2 battery drains and deleted and readded exchange like was suggested. Also turned off some but not all location services. Looks pretty good now doesn't it?

 

[mattcube64]

Alright everyone, my first post here; just trying to provide some feedback to help others out.

I pre-ordered my AT&T 16GB 4S when they went live, but didn't get home from travel until Tuesday this week. I had already heard about all the issues, and took the advice I had heard to set-up the phone as a brand new phone, and then I synced my contacts later with iCloud.

My battery life is *FAR* from "great", and it's obviously inferior to my GF's regular 4 model. That said, it seems to be better than what some of you are experiencing.

I took some pics. After charging Tuesday night, I started the day yesterday with 100% battery. LATE into the evening, these are the details I had:

I tried to do a little bit of everything. About 60% of that was at HALF brightness; and about 40% was at FULL brightness. I talked on the phone for about an hour in a good service area. I made a FaceTime call for about an hour. I texted throughout the day. I sent a few emails. I browsed the internet for maybe an hour or so. I downloaded and installed Real Racing 2 via WiFi and played for about 25 minutes. ALL location services were set to on.

The battery died about 10 minutes after snapping that screenshot. I let it sit dead for about 30 minutes, and then charged it to 100%. I had the fortitude to sleep in today, so ignore the time ;p , but as soon as I woke I started browsing the internet on Wifi. It dropped to 99% after about 17 minutes:

... and you can see that something was grabbing my location, too.

I took a shower, got ready, and goofed around for a few, and came back to this:

***

FINAL THOUGHTS: The 4S definitely has a shorter battery life. I'm hopeful some firmware/software tweaks/updates will increase the life to more 4-area levels. That said, I think my phone and screenshots prove that customers (you guys) should be able to expect significantly more than what you're getting. Your crappy battery life is not the result of a faster/more power-hungry phone, but most CERTAINLY some type of either 1) defect, or 2) a software/app variable.

Good luck to everyone here, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

 

[cababah]

guys, something else to consider about standby issues is the reception you have. if you have bad reception, and your phone is constantly fighting to get a 3G signal than obviously that will suck a lot more juice.

and add the fact that we have no option to turn off 3G so it kind of leaves us dead in the water with standby drain if you are in an area where service is spotty.

 

[BrightCanon]

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)

View attachment 308323

I did a full restore, 2 battery drains and deleted and readded exchange like was suggested. Also turned off some but not all location services. Looks pretty good now doesn't it?

Wow.

 

[Ceebee1980]

My battery life wasn't awful, but wasn't great either during the first week.
But as of last night, I sucked it up and did a restore, set up phone as new, then backed up to iTunes.

So far today, at:

86% battery
50 mins usage (a bit of siri, emails, and text msgs, most loc-services back on)
8h:45m standby

One interesting note: I see a lot of people MESSING with diagnostic settings. But have many of you actually investigated the events being recorded in there?
I had several low-memory warnings, and even a kernel panic with the factory-setup.
Since my restore, I have neither. Food for thought... maybe ATT or the factory had a crummy copy of iOS5 loaded up?

 

[kumquat]

My Stand-By time is actually pretty decent despite the fact that I live in an area with variable reception. I have no qualms with my Stand-By life. My problem is that I only get about an hour and a half of usage time with nothing turned on.

I'm, also, getting a weird glitch in Usage. The phone thinks it was last charged about 6 hours ago when it was really last charged yesterday.

 

[jamesarm97]

I see some suggestions of setting up as new after a restore. Don't you loose all app settings and data associated with those apps if the phone it setup as new? I can deal with reselecting the apps, music is from the cloud so I am not worried with that either, just don't want to loose all my settings and text messages.

 

[7timethecrystal]

I started a poll. Very curious to see the split...I bet it's something like 65/35, with the 35% reporting excessive drain.

 

[aaac2]

excessive cellular data the battery drain cause?

I usually use less than 200 mb per month in 3g data (past 6 months), but this month I'm already up to 700 mb with a few weeks to go. I have iCloud turned on, but have iCloud backup off. There are several posts on this forum and elsewhere where people have been stating they've been overcharged for data (or near their quota limits) even though their normal pattern has not changed.

see:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1257976/
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1258341/

Further searching google, I came across this post where a user jailbroke their phone and analyzed the excessive data and determined something iCloud related was consistently hitting apple's servers at an almost constant 1 k/s. The user also saw this activity stop once the iCloud account was deleted from his phone.

see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3108640

So my guess is whatever iCloud related bug is causing the constant 3g connection (that is also potentially skipping wifi?) is causing both a battery drain due to the constant data requests as well as excessively burning through 3g data. Again, just a guess, but thought I'd add this to the conversation.

 

[7timethecrystal]

I see some suggestions of setting up as new after a restore. Don't you loose all app settings and data associated with those apps if the phone it setup as new? I can deal with reselecting the apps, music is from the cloud so I am not worried with that either, just don't want to loose all my settings and text messages.

Contacts, messages, app data, will be lost but apps will sync back over.

 

[elistan]

Also I wish we had set up a poll to see how many people were experiencing this to see how wide spread it is.

Will this help?
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1259333/

 

[Andrew07]

Like others I'm getting results that are noticeably poorer than the 4S but not so terrible that I want to go fuming to the Apple store. Today I'm down 40% after a few phone calls, email checking, twitter.

 

[cababah]

My battery life wasn't awful, but wasn't great either during the first week.
But as of last night, I sucked it up and did a restore, set up phone as new, then backed up to iTunes.

So far today, at:

86% battery
50 mins usage (a bit of siri, emails, and text msgs, most loc-services back on)
8h:45m standby

One interesting note: I see a lot of people MESSING with diagnostic settings. But have many of you actually investigated the events being recorded in there?
I had several low-memory warnings, and even a kernel panic with the factory-setup.
Since my restore, I have neither. Food for thought... maybe ATT or the factory had a crummy copy of iOS5 loaded up?

I look at these too. My original phone was having several kernel panics and rebooting itself. I even did a full factory restore which seemed to fix it for a day or so until it started doing it again. I did ANOTHER restore which also fixed it for a day or so before it did it again. Eventually, I had the phone replaced at an Apple Store. I have seen some low memory warnings and other things but these are normal I think. The iOS is just logging the data. A low memory warning is probably just an application that is drawing too much memory before the operating system kills it and then it makes a log file. I wouldn't worry too much about those minor things but a kernel panic and continuous resetting is definitely a pain in the butt.

Overall, I think iOS 5 has some ways to go.

 

[gerelee]

i've been unplugged since last night, not a lot of use since then, some whatsapp, email and a few other things ... i have my emails set to fetch, also followed some of the settings that others have suggested here and it seems to be MUCH better!!

 

[SK360]

Doesn't seem too bad eh? Signal in my building at work will show 3-4 bars but it will churn away trying to load anything... Downtown Pittsburgh sucks for AT&T.

I am still seeing the charge % drop overnight... plugged it in when I went to bed, was at 100% in the middle of the night and 97% when I woke up still plugged in with the charged icon. I unplugged and plugged it back in when I went to get a shower and get ready and it hit 100% again.