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Do I have a faulty battery or is this normal?

K

kettlecorn

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 21, 2011
284
0
Cause if its normal it's really bad and I will have to go back to Android. My first real iphone (Iphone 5) and today I got to try it out. I left the house with 55% and was running errands for 2.5 hours. About 20 minutes of GPS navigation, then had a doctor's appointment so it was on standby. After 30 minutes, more GPS navigation, standby. Also some texting to meet with someone. No real voice calls, auto brightness. Wifi was off.

It died on the way home, barely made it past 2-3 hours of usage time. Mind you this is a new device. I did a search and found that 6.1.2 was out so I restored everything to factory and installed the update. It was charged maybe 75% and now it's 40% and I was gone for less than an hour. Using navigation the entire time. Nothing else, not even browsing. No voice calls.

Is this normal? will apple replace this under warranty? I love this phone so much I decided that I will stick it out even with Tmobile's crappy iphone refarmed coverage in hopes of LTE in the next few months but battery life is huge!
 
The GPS navigation, find my freinds etc. really do drain the battery. Having said that, you really should get more life than this. It's a new phone, so allow it to drain completely until it shuts down by itself. Then recharge it to 100% and see if that helps.
 
kettlecorn said:
I left the house with 55% and was running errands for 2.5 hours.
Click to expand...
Hmm left the house? In the morning? You should leave it plugged in every night-just common sense. Unless you left later in the day and were using the phone at home. Still even then I try to leave it plugged in at home, I have gotten in trouble the weekends with heavy gaming etc. before heading out later in the day.
 
kettlecorn said:
Cause if its normal it's really bad and I will have to go back to Android. My first real iphone (Iphone 5) and today I got to try it out. I left the house with 55% and was running errands for 2.5 hours. About 20 minutes of GPS navigation, then had a doctor's appointment so it was on standby. After 30 minutes, more GPS navigation, standby. Also some texting to meet with someone. No real voice calls, auto brightness. Wifi was off.

It died on the way home, barely made it past 2-3 hours of usage time. Mind you this is a new device. I did a search and found that 6.1.2 was out so I restored everything to factory and installed the update. It was charged maybe 75% and now it's 40% and I was gone for less than an hour. Using navigation the entire time. Nothing else, not even browsing. No voice calls.

Is this normal? will apple replace this under warranty? I love this phone so much I decided that I will stick it out even with Tmobile's crappy iphone refarmed coverage in hopes of LTE in the next few months but battery life is huge!
Click to expand...

Since you started off with 55% - it seems normal. Over the past weekend, I used the Google Maps navigation for a 4 hour drive, but I had the screen off and only had the voice over telling me when to turn/ change lanes etc. It went from 94% to 49% in the duration. I am sure if I had the screen on all the while, I would have killed it.
 
Give it a week. Battery life is sometimes not perfect as first until it gets to stretch its legs.

Also, when you say GPS, do you just mean having maps open? That is a pretty big killer. Either get a car charger or, if you're walking, open maps every few blocks to check, don't just carry the phone with it running.
 
kettlecorn said:
Cause if its normal it's really bad and I will have to go back to Android. My first real iphone (Iphone 5) and today I got to try it out. I left the house with 55% and was running errands for 2.5 hours. About 20 minutes of GPS navigation, then had a doctor's appointment so it was on standby. After 30 minutes, more GPS navigation, standby. Also some texting to meet with someone. No real voice calls, auto brightness. Wifi was off.

It died on the way home, barely made it past 2-3 hours of usage time. Mind you this is a new device. I did a search and found that 6.1.2 was out so I restored everything to factory and installed the update. It was charged maybe 75% and now it's 40% and I was gone for less than an hour. Using navigation the entire time. Nothing else, not even browsing. No voice calls.

Is this normal? will apple replace this under warranty? I love this phone so much I decided that I will stick it out even with Tmobile's crappy iphone refarmed coverage in hopes of LTE in the next few months but battery life is huge!
Click to expand...

My iPhone 5 usually gets 18 - 24 hours. GPS uses a lot of battery. Saying your going to android because of the battery is a little ridiculous since androids battery life is horrible. With every android I have had in the past I was lucky for the phone to last past 5pm and that was without using GPS.
 
Prime85 said:
My iPhone 5 usually gets 18 - 24 hours. GPS uses a lot of battery. Saying your going to android because of the battery is a little ridiculous since androids battery life is horrible. With every android I have had in the past I was lucky for the phone to last past 5pm and that was without using GPS.
Click to expand...

Well i have to disagree with that statement. Saying android has bad battery life is ridiculous cause android isn't a hardware, it's a software OS. The galaxy s3 I just sold to switch over to the iphone had not so great battery life but even to be fair, it was running a ton more stuff with true multitasking, doing the same stuff I was doing with the iphone yesterday, had that big ass amoled display and still got better battery life. I was using maps with it open, like the screen on the entire time. I have done this with every android device but of course not all android devices are the same. The ones I've had are the mytouch 4g galaxy s3, and the galaxy note II. The mytouch 4g I can leave the navigation on with screen on for HOURS. No exaggeration. The galaxy s3 is SLIGHTLY better than my experience last night with the iphone 5 but definitely needs a car charger when running navigation due to its big display.
Here's the kicker.. the galaxy note II despite its monstrosity of a screen, quad core processor, video in video, and all that crap, has INSANE battery life. It's been on standby for 3 days now and I used tons of navigation on it with screen on, and I'll also add that when I use navigation as a passenger, I just leave it on and also browse the web or watch youtube videos, etc. How it has the long battery life I'll never know.

But despite all that, I still like the iphone lol. Just pointing out that not all android devices have bad battery, most actually in my experience have amazing battery life. They also can be swapped out. But they lack in other areas of hardware usually, nothing beats the iphone hardware. So sleek and well constructed.

I'm running this phone to 0 and checking the usage because I saw a thread where people were posting their iphone 5 usage and some people were getting 8 hours standby and 6 hours usage or something while others were barely getting 2 hours of screen time. I feel like I'm in the 2nd group.
 
kettlecorn said:
Well i have to disagree with that statement. Saying android has bad battery life is ridiculous cause android isn't a hardware, it's a software OS. The galaxy s3 I just sold to switch over to the iphone had not so great battery life but even to be fair, it was running a ton more stuff with true multitasking, doing the same stuff I was doing with the iphone yesterday, had that big ass amoled display and still got better battery life. I was using maps with it open, like the screen on the entire time. I have done this with every android device but of course not all android devices are the same. The ones I've had are the mytouch 4g galaxy s3, and the galaxy note II. The mytouch 4g I can leave the navigation on with screen on for HOURS. No exaggeration. The galaxy s3 is SLIGHTLY better than my experience last night with the iphone 5 but definitely needs a car charger when running navigation due to its big display.
Here's the kicker.. the galaxy note II despite its monstrosity of a screen, quad core processor, video in video, and all that crap, has INSANE battery life. It's been on standby for 3 days now and I used tons of navigation on it with screen on, and I'll also add that when I use navigation as a passenger, I just leave it on and also browse the web or watch youtube videos, etc. How it has the long battery life I'll never know.

But despite all that, I still like the iphone lol. Just pointing out that not all android devices have bad battery, most actually in my experience have amazing battery life. They also can be swapped out. But they lack in other areas of hardware usually, nothing beats the iphone hardware. So sleek and well constructed.

I'm running this phone to 0 and checking the usage because I saw a thread where people were posting their iphone 5 usage and some people were getting 8 hours standby and 6 hours usage or something while others were barely getting 2 hours of screen time. I feel like I'm in the 2nd group.
Click to expand...

My Battery life with my iPhone 5 was horrible the first week. If you haven't had it long then try breaking the battery in a little. Run it dead a couple of times and fully recharge it and you might see better battery life.
 
GPS eats battery. If you had said you didn't use GPS it would be a different story.

Why don't you have it plugged in your car to charge while using navigation?
 
Guys, I'm one of the most pro-Android people on this forums, and I have to say that Android isn't very good at managing battery life. In Boston over the weekend, I checked Google Maps for 10 minutes whilst using Google Now. My battery dropped over a percent a minute - by the time I got to my destination, I had gone from 75% to 50%.

But the same holds true for all OS's. Maps uses data, display, and GPS at the same time, which really wears out your battery quickly.
 
Yeah im going to try to break it in I think it may have been better today. just weird cause i normally use maps a lot and dont use a car charger. I think i may have been spoiled by my mytouch4g.
 
This is turning into an Android thread when it doesn't need too.

OP, big killers of battery are navigation especially if you have the screen on the entire time. And low signal strength. If you are using hybrid view for navigation, forget about it.

I can be using tapatalk in a low signal area and watch my battery drop incredibly fast. Since I travel a lot I turned off push email because that killed my battery unless I had good signal all the time.

I think we can all safely say the iPhone 5 has pretty good battery life. It all just depends on what type of usage. I find 6-7 hours with decent signal strength to be normal for my 4S.
 
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