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iPhone 3GS battery drained EACH morning ... ?

mgpg89

mgpg89

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 31, 2008
970
16
Belgium
I have my iPhone 3GS for 3 days now (my first iPhone btw) and every morning so far, the battery has been empty.

Last night for example, I went to sleep with about half a charge left and this morning, it was empty. (WiFi was off, bluetooth was off)

Is there something I'm not seeing here?

thanks!
 
Wirelessly posted (iPhone 3GS (White, 32GB): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_0 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7A341 Safari/528.16)

I don't mean to state the obvious, but if my battery was dead 'every morning,' I'd probably leave it on the charger overnight. ;)
 
Two things to test and make sure you do not have a bad battery.

1) Close all open Safari Web pages unitl only the white blank page is left.

2) Before closing your eyes for the night...turn OFF your iphone for about 10 sec and turn it back on and do not touch anything.

3) If it still drains, remove all your apps and see what happens overnight.

If that all fails...take your phone back, you have a bad battery.
 
SFC Archer said:
Two things to test and make sure you do not have a bad battery.

1) Close all open Safari Web pages unitl only the white blank page is left.

2) Before closing your eyes for the night...turn OFF your iphone for about 10 sec and turn it back on and do not touch anything.

3) If it still drains, remove all your apps and see what happens overnight.

If that all fails...take your phone back, you have a bad battery.
Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll try that!
 
You're not fully charging it. You probably unplug once it appears full, but isn't really full.

However, why the heck would you go to sleep for 8 hours with half a charge when you could be charging all this time?
 
3G/Push/Fetch(with short updates) will easily destroy battery life.

Display brightness also makes a difference (although not if its draining overnight).
 
JayLenochiniMac said:
However, why the heck would you go to sleep for 8 hours with half a charge when you could be charging all this time?
Click to expand...

Because my dock (to charge) is in the other room and I want to use it as an alarm clock.

And because I expect my €675 phone's battery to last a night in sleep mode.
 
mgpg89 said:
Because my dock (to charge) is in the other room and I want to use it as an alarm clock.

And because I expect my €675 phone's battery to last a night in sleep mode.
Click to expand...

The iPhone makes a great alarm clock, so after checking out your battery to make sure it's good, you might want to invest in another charging cable for your bedside table. I've been using mine that way for 1 1/2 years and it's the best alarm that I've ever had and I wake up with a full charge every morning!
 
SFC Archer said:
Two things to test and make sure you do not have a bad battery.

1) Close all open Safari Web pages unitl only the white blank page is left.

2) Before closing your eyes for the night...turn OFF your iphone for about 10 sec and turn it back on and do not touch anything.

3) If it still drains, remove all your apps and see what happens overnight.

If that all fails...take your phone back, you have a bad battery.
Click to expand...

In addition to this when you go to sleep note the usage and standby times. When you get up in the morning note them again. If they aren't that divergant then you probably have an app running in the background or something running amock on your phone. This weekend my brand new 3GS has this problem. After taking it off the charger usage and standby numbers were identical and I basically just left it on the desk for an hour. That should not have been the case at all. What I think happened is something carried over from a backup because I restored the firmware, restored from backup and it was still occuring. I then took everything off my phone except my contacts (emails, Apps, everything), backed it up, restored the firmware again, restored the backup with just my contacts and then checked usage/standby numbers. From there everything looked like it was ok so I stated adding mail accounts and things back in. Everything is fine now. I'm not quite sure what it was but the phone works fine :)
 
I'd imagine Push/ regular fetch is a big part. Put it on manual for an evening and see how much charge keeps.
 
Regardless of whatever i've been doing on my iphone the sleep discharge rate for me is about 1% per hour .... i went to bed with iphone at around 38% last night and it was about 30% this morning ... i would take yours back ...

U shouldn't need to shut anything off prior to sleep to allow the phone to not discharge that much overnight
 
AustinSTI said:
In addition to this when you go to sleep note the usage and standby times. When you get up in the morning note them again. If they aren't that divergant then you probably have an app running in the background or something running amock on your phone. This weekend my brand new 3GS has this problem. After taking it off the charger usage and standby numbers were identical and I basically just left it on the desk for an hour. That should not have been the case at all. What I think happened is something carried over from a backup because I restored the firmware, restored from backup and it was still occuring. I then took everything off my phone except my contacts (emails, Apps, everything), backed it up, restored the firmware again, restored the backup with just my contacts and then checked usage/standby numbers. From there everything looked like it was ok so I stated adding mail accounts and things back in. Everything is fine now. I'm not quite sure what it was but the phone works fine :)
Click to expand...

How do usage and standby times work?
Standby = sleep mode
Usage = when you're actually using the device ?

So after sleeping, the standby should have increased and the usage should've stayed the same, right?

I didn't revert my 3GS from a back-up... configured it as a new phone.
 
synagence said:
Regardless of whatever i've been doing on my iphone the sleep discharge rate for me is about 1% per hour .... i went to bed with iphone at around 38% last night and it was about 30% this morning ... i would take yours back ...

U shouldn't need to shut anything off prior to sleep to allow the phone to not discharge that much overnight
Click to expand...

I'll call Apple in a bit ...
 
mgpg89 said:
How do usage and standby times work?
Standby = sleep mode
Usage = when you're actually using the device ?

So after sleeping, the standby should have increased and the usage should've stayed the same, right?

I didn't revert my 3GS from a back-up... configured it as a new phone.
Click to expand...

Yeah that's basically it.

Standby = Phone not doing anything but standing by
Usage = anything that the phone does with voice, data, sms. Send email, recieve email, send/recieve sms, browse web page, get a call, use an app all count to usage. therefore is something is running and running in the background like a leftover process, or an email account stuck in fetch mode, usage will just go up and up and up with Standby (cause the phone is never really standing by).

Usage should never be >= Standby
 
t0mat0 said:
I'd imagine Push/ regular fetch is a big part. Put it on manual for an evening and see how much charge keeps.
Click to expand...


Meh that's not true. Push is dependent on how many emails the op gets in the overnight period. 1 email = 1 push. Fetch is dependant on the interval set. If its set to manual then yes push will always consume more.

If he has it set to fetch every hour, that's say 8 hours or 8 fetchs.
If he only gets 5 emails push will consume less battery than fetch.
 
I'll be out the house for a couple of hours now and I'll submit it to some on the field testing ...

Some calling, the occasional app while waiting somewhere, editing my calendar etc. I switched on battery percentage mode so I can report back when I get home in a couple of hours. Leaving with a full charge. Wish me luck haha
 
Actually, don't be fooled.

Standby Time = Time turned on.

Usage Time = Time phone is in use.

In other words, if you pull your phone off the charger in the morning at 8 AM, then by 5 PM, it will say 9 hours of Stand By time no matter how much you use the phone.

The Stand By label is really misleading.

Now, if those two times stay even, then you have something running in the back ground that shouldn't be.
 
Rat-Boy said:
Actually, don't be fooled.

Standby Time = Time turned on.

Usage Time = Time phone is in use.

In other words, if you pull your phone off the charger in the morning at 8 AM, then by 5 PM, it will say 9 hours of Stand By time no matter how much you use the phone.

The Stand By label is really misleading.

Now, if those two times stay even, then you have something running in the back ground that shouldn't be.
Click to expand...

Alright, so usage time can NEVER be higher than standby time?

Quite a misleading label, indeed.
Good to know though, thanks!

I'll even add a Nike+ running session to the field testing ;-)
 
I just got my phone on Sat and last night wanted to see how much it drained overnight. I was at 91% when I went to bed and woke up at 85%. I have all my apps off when I'm not using like Push, GPS, Bluetooth etc...

Try charging fully, turn off all your apps and then see what it looks like in the am before taking in. Good Luck;)
 
mgpg89 said:
Because my dock (to charge) is in the other room and I want to use it as an alarm clock.

And because I expect my €675 phone's battery to last a night in sleep mode.
Click to expand...

Fine, but that indicates you're charging it during the day and remove from the dock when you think it appears full, but not really fully charged. As in laptops, battery charges up quickly then slows down until fully charged. You've not been fully charging the battery. My suggestion is to get another cable (no dock) and plug it in next to your bed.
 
I don't pretend to be the iPhone battery king of knowledge by any stretch.

But I do the same thing with my 3GS that I did with my 3G.

I plug it up when I go to bed, let it charge over night, and then un-plug it in the morning when I get up.

I do this no matter where my battery % is when I go to bed.

Then, once a month, I let the phone run all the way down and fully charge to calibrate the battery.
 
SFC Archer said:
Two things to test and make sure you do not have a bad battery.

1) Close all open Safari Web pages unitl only the white blank page is left.

2) Before closing your eyes for the night...turn OFF your iphone for about 10 sec and turn it back on and do not touch anything.

3) If it still drains, remove all your apps and see what happens overnight.

If that all fails...take your phone back, you have a bad battery.
Click to expand...

I would even take this a step farther. After turning the iPhone back on set it to airplane mode so no network activity can occur. It will probably charge better this way.
 
I too was unhappy with my 3GS battery life, but now it is really good. I let the 3GS die twice and recharged it to full. Now, I just top it off after I hit about 30%. I also turned off 3G, notifications and bluetooth. I turn them on when I need them. My latest numbers are:

Battery: 41%
Usage: 5 Hours, 14 Minutes
Standby: 1 Day, 3 Hours (e.g. 27 hours)
Call Time: 28 minutes

I use wi-fi at home all the time, and only turn on 3G when needed out of the home.

In a perfect world, I could have all services on and get the same battery life. It is not a perfect world, and I make compromises based on what is important to me.
 
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