Batterygate??

[BBNYC]

I shipped my 4S back to apple yesterday, after no success turning off all the new features (Siri, iCloud, push) and still losing at least 35% on overnight standby.

I'm back with my iPhone 4 and I have noticed a drastic difference between the batterys, and I'm using the same exact settings. I understand the new antenna, A5 chip, Siri, but the upgrade is really not worth the trouble at this point.

 

[Paranorml]

Right now my battery is performing adequately. 53% left after 1 day of standby, 4.5 hours of usage. Those 4.5 hours were a mix between 3g and wifi - 30-45 minute phone call, updated a couple apps, constant streaming of Pandora, text messaging, safari browsing/facebook/twitter and about 30 minutes of game play.

Will most likely be draining down to zero today. First time I did that it seemed to help. I have a C39 serial with most location services on all system services off and siri off for the time being as I don't seem myself using her too much. Mail is set to manual - deleted both account and re-added.

 

[Hudzilla]

I went to the apple store on monday and was told to reset the phone.

I came home, updated the phone via itunes and completey rebuilt

Tested and all great for a number of days

Then last night it dropped from 100% to flat in 4 hours in standby mode with nothing running.

Went to the apple store today and they confirmed to wait for 5.01 and its a known problem

Hmmmm seems to be getting attention by Apple then...

 

[tk0084]

And welcome to the topic of the thread... that's my point... my phone logged 45 minutes of usage while I was sleeping. Additionally I power cycled the phone before I put it down for the night, so nothing should have been running.

It's abundantly clear that something is running in the background, eating through everyone's batteries... if we all knew what that was this thread would have ended days ago.

I have FAR LESS than the default options enabled out of the box, and my battery life is 5x less than promised by Apple... so either they are fluffing the numbers, or the phone is having an issue. Maybe it's just mine, I'm just reporting what I'm seeing.

And what I'm saying is maybe you need to make more changes. I personally made some changes yesterday based on suggestions of this thread and others and thus far it has resulted in 99% remaining after 29 min of usage and 2 hours 2 min of standby.

I also use a battery app when I charge that seems to help a bit.

 

[trouble747]

Again... from 100% to 79% over just over 8.5 hours, and I hadn't even unlocked the screen once.

Yeah, that's definitely not right. I don't think the battery on mine has been great, but it only loses about 3-4% overnight if left unplugged.

 

[ikeyes]

And what I'm saying is maybe you need to make more changes. I personally made some changes yesterday based on suggestions of this thread and others and thus far it has resulted in 99% remaining after 29 min of usage and 2 hours 2 min of standby.

I also use a battery app when I charge that seems to help a bit.

Look I understand you are trying to help, but I paid $500 for this phone and cannot use the best features it has to offer...

If they are quoting 200 Hours of Standby time in Airplane mode than that is just straight up deception... something I personally haven't ever associated with Apple.

I am an IT Sys. Admin and have been working with the iPhone for the last 3+ years since purchasing a 3G for my personal use, and having deployed a few hundred of them for employee's at work... I am more than familiar with the tweaks that can be used to maximize battery life.

5% drain per hour in Standby is completely unacceptable, do you not agree?

That's all I'm saying, not upset with you in the least.

 

[JRoDDz]

What do you mean by 'turning it off' mine is just a greyed out button, that becomes clickable when connected to wifi

Connect the iPhone to iTunes with your sync cable on your computer. Make sure "Wifi Sync" is not checked (enabled).


P.S. It is syncing automatically when you are plugged into power and in sleep mode. That is what WiFi Syncing is. Hence your overnight battery drain. It shouldn't be draining like that but there must be some kind of bug with wifi syncing right now.

 

[KneelbfZod]

After reading this thread I am quite surprised to learn there are people who don't charge their iPhones overnight. I charge mine every single night. The iPhone is NOT a phone. It's a small computer that also happens to be able to make phone calls. Think about that.

 

[ikeyes]

After reading this thread I am quite surprised to learn there are people who don't charge their iPhones overnight. I charge mine every single night. The iPhone is NOT a phone. It's a small computer that also happens to be able to make phone calls. Think about that.

The reason most people in here aren't plugging in at night is just to test the battery, I would normally plug in my phone while I sleep... as most do I would imagine.

 

[DiamondMac]

In another thread I said that I felt that the battery of the 4s was similar to my iPhone 4

After a few more days, holy smokes was I wrong.

The battery on my 4s is probably 1/2 as good. I keep running out during the night and/or during the day when I never did before (and it is not being used often during these times).

 

[clifgriffin]

I shipped my 4S back to apple yesterday, after no success turning off all the new features (Siri, iCloud, push) and still losing at least 35% on overnight standby.

I'm back with my iPhone 4 and I have noticed a drastic difference between the batterys, and I'm using the same exact settings. I understand the new antenna, A5 chip, Siri, but the upgrade is really not worth the trouble at this point.

You had a defective phone, or there is a serious software bug. Either way, I wouldn't give up just yet.

Mine was at 18% after 18 hours unplugged and normal usage all day, yesterday. Perfectly inline with iPhone 4 performance.

 

[PantalonesSucia]

You had a defective phone, or there is a serious software bug. Either way, I wouldn't give up just yet.

Mine was at 18% after 18 hours unplugged and normal usage all day, yesterday. Perfectly inline with iPhone 4 performance.

I charge my 4S overnight while sleeping. I unplug it, go about my day and about 3:30 or 4pm, I need to charge it again as it's usually close to 0%.

Depending on my phone calls or texting or web browsing, I may charge it twice during one day.

This seems not right.

 

[jkozlow3]

my result, after a full restore last night, still seems pretty crappy to me,

Image

6-7 hours of usage is about normal, depending on what that usage consists of. What I hate is that Apple calculates usage based on anytime the phone is not in sleep mode. Sitting there with the screen on, doing nothing else will obviously yield very different results than making calls, gaming and surfing the web, yet they all count toward the same "usage" number.

 

[rml4uk]

Any one having battery issues please try going into

Settings > Mail,Contacts, Calenders > Fetch New Data > Turn Push Off.

Then, continue and go into advanced, then turn off any other push services.

This should return your battery to normal.

Thank you for this. I wasn't having battery issues before because I went in on day one and changed some settings, but I've been wondering why I was still getting my work emails pushed to my phone even though I had mail set to fetch. I also didn't know that iCloud was still being pushed. Seems a little redundant to have a setting for push/fetch when you still have to go in and set push/fetch for each thing. Oh well.

As far as my battery goes, yesterday was the first full day I had it. I got it Wednesday evening, used it that night (got down to around 50%) then charged it back to 100%. By 10:00pm last night after fairly normal usage for me (Siri several times, moderate web browsing, 15-20 minutes of music playback, quite a bit of texting/imessaging) I was down to about 20%. I wanted to do a full charge cycle last night, so to drain the battery, I turned on wifi and location services and watched Starship Troopers in its entirety on Crackle. The battery finally died at 12:30pm.

I took it off the charger this morning at 6:45 with it showing 100%. So far today all I've done is send maybe 5 iMessages and spend 10 minutes or so showing a co-worker how insanely fast the camera lets you take multiple pictures (7 in about 3 seconds) and gave him a Siri demo. So now, after pretty light usage and having been off the charger for almost 5 hours, I'm still at 97%. I'm happy

 

[tk0084]

5% drain per hour in Standby is completely unacceptable, do you not agree?

That's all I'm saying, not upset with you in the least.

Yes I agree but as your stat's showed it's not 100% standby time and if it were then you'd be down to under 60% battery life if it was 5% per hour at 8.5 hours. (and maybe you are and I missed your updated stats).

I'm just attempting to assist with battery life until a patch comes out. I personally don't care about iCloud so I deleted my iCloud info and turned off all system services. Outside of those items I didn't change anything and it has definitely changed my battery life (which I didn't deem as bad before but I was coming off an almost 2 yr old 3GS with original battery).

Prior to these changes I would have said my battery was similar to yours, maybe a slight bit better but I'm a heavy user throughout the day on my phone so I have never paid that close attention to the stats.

 

[Oppressed]

Ok so far I've been doing some basic tests with three iPhone 4S. Two that I owned and my Apple store's floor model. All have different serial numbers. I used the lap test to see how long it would take to drop one percent of battery life under certain conditions and here is an average that I've found.

Test Controls:
- All other apps are disabled
- Brightness set to 100% and auto brightness disabled
- Times were calculated with the sample number times 98 then added 20 mins to roughly estimate the time to go from 100 to 99 and 1 to 0.

Airplane mode across all devices resulted in a solid 4 mins 10 second average time per drop which equates to about 7 hours 8 mins of usage.

iCloud enabled on the devices resulted in about 3 mins 25 seconds per drop which equates to about 5 hours and 54 mins.

iCloud disabled resulted in about 3 mins 55 seconds per drop which equates to 6 hours and 44 mins of usage.

Granted this is napkin math and the numbers may drop slightly during standby, but this is what I'm beginning to see as the norm.

 

[jkozlow3]

I think you need to be sceptical about the usage figure as mine is between 75 and 85% of the standby figure even though I have turned off as many background processes as I can and I am not using the phone for anything like the quoted figure. I think that is the issue - something is running in the background draining the battery and I will wait till next week for Apple to release some information/fix or I will return the handset for a refund and wait and see what happens.

I really must stop buying new products from Apple on day 1 (if I keep telling myself that it might just sink in this time!)

Agreed. I fully charged my phone to 100% last night before bed, rebooted it and unplugged it to see how much it would drain overnight. I also turned off wifi to see if it being on 3G would cause a larger drain. I did play with it a little before bed - maybe 15 minutes tops. I ran a couple of speed tests and not much more.

I woke up this morning to a 9% battery drop while on 3G with a full signal (93% down to 84%) and I had received 5-6 new push emails overnight which were appearing in the notification center which I proceeded to quickly read on the phone. I then looked at my "usage" number and it was around 1 hour 30 minutes!! There is NO WAY I used my phone for more than 20 minutes total since unplugging it from a full charge!

Something is definitely running in the background. I've also disabled just about EVERYTHING that has been recommended in this thread and others (all location services - particularly the system services, siri, iMessage, ping, iCloud, wifi sync, diagnostics, etc, etc). In fact, about the only thing I have not yet disabled is push email (2 exchange accounts) and push notifications for facebook. I guess I'll try those next, but the usage stats are definitely being reported incorrectly in iOS 5! 20 minutes of usage should not be being reported as 1 hour 30 minutes!!

 

[bydandie]

I've been dealing with this too. I shut down everything I've seen so far as a cure. It's helped a little. Last night I charged the 4S to 100 percent and decided to test it overnight with wifi shut off. the battery barely moved. Is this a new wifi board in this phone? My 4 never had this problem and I kept wifi on all the time.

Switched wireless off here as well, and have seen an improvement. Wireless in the previous models apparently stopped the 3G radio from taking too much power when switched on. Maybe it doesn't in this one?

 

[VidPro]

Switched wireless off here as well, and have seen an improvement. Wireless in the previous models apparently stopped the 3G radio from taking too much power when switched on. Maybe it doesn't in this one?

Not sure. I'm running it now after a full charge. No wifi again to see if the difference was as big as before.

 

[7timethecrystal]

My replacement 4S from the Apple Store is performing like a dream now. Left it unplugged at 99% battery last night; 8 hours later, woke up to 95%. I was losing 30% or more with my other unit.

My problem was a hung background task that constantly ran, and it was dependent on a network connection (it didn't matter if it was Wi-Fi or 3G). I deleted all my e-mail accounts, turned off all location services, deleted key internet communicating apps, and none of it mattered. I think it was related to apps from the original sync, but whatever it was, it could NOT be killed. It said yesterday my phone was in use for 9 hours, and the truth is, it should have been closer to two. In standby, something just sat there and chewed.

So, I'm really pleased now with my 4S. All the stuff is on that I would have on (some push e-mail, notifications, location services, etc.) and the battery is performing just like it should.

----------

I guess I'll try those next, but the usage stats are definitely being reported incorrectly in iOS 5! 20 minutes of usage should not be being reported as 1 hour 30 minutes!!

Something is definitely chewing in the background there, as the same thing happened to me on my old unit prior to swap.

 

[aeaglex07]

2 days ago I charged my phone to 100%. While it was still plugged in i deleted my 2 mail accounts and reset network settings and then re entered my email accounts.
This seemed to fix my battery drain.

However I still felt like my iPhone was faulty and i didn't want to get stuck with a bad one so I called Apple and the tech had me reset all settings. he told me to monitor it for a couple of days and call them back if its still draining (interestingly he told me this has been a common issue, so at least they know about it)

Anyways, resetting everything has caused my battery drain to return.

Something is definitely wrong with the software. Hopefully they can push out a fix soon.

 

[3460169]

Ok so far I've been doing some basic tests with three iPhone 4S. Two that I owned and my Apple store's floor model. All have different serial numbers. I used the lap test to see how long it would take to drop one percent of battery life under certain conditions and here is an average that I've found.

Test Controls:
- All other apps are disabled
- Brightness set to 100% and auto brightness disabled
- Times were calculated with the sample number times 98 then added 20 mins to roughly estimate the time to go from 100 to 99 and 1 to 0.
...

Do you have an iphone 4 or two you could throw in the mix to see how the numbers compare?

 

[ViperDesign]

I have 11 hours of usage, 15 hours standby.

Sitting at 24%.

Just an update to this. I have turned off push for email and instead using every 15 minutes. Figure if it is so important they can call or text me.

Location services/system I have everything off except cell network search.

I have brightness at auto/ with the slider just under 50%.

Again I was really shocked to see 11 hours of usage. Seems out of wake with most of you having six or so hours.

But I am constantly picking up and using my phone either calling or texting people.

 

[ViperDesign]

Here is an image of today's usage. Just over five hours and I am sitting at 71%.

 

[3460169]

I can't get over how completely random this battery performance is.

In some cases my phone loses very little, if any, percentage over night. In other cases, like 8 hours over last night to this morning, it can lose 15%.

A few days ago I did a commute test -- using the phone fairly heavily on the way to work (Siri stuff & music). Didn't lose a percentage. Similar test today over the same commute and 10% dropped off.

Really looking forward to a software update.

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Here is an image of today's usage. Just over five hours and I am sitting at 71%.

72% here. Twice the standby but less than half the usage.