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iPhone 4 Battery Life

P

powermapler

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jul 3, 2009
15
0
I got my iPhone 4 two days ago, and my battery life has been quite bad. (I think.)

With fairly heavy usage (3d games, internet browsing on wifi, youtube over wifi, music and push emails on, bluetooth off) I can only get about 5-6 hours of battery life doing this. No apps running in the background, brightness on half, location services off.

For example, last night I was on Gizmodo while listening to music. I could literally watch my phone dropping by 1% every 5-10 minutes. Is this normal?

Do I need to simply break my battery in? Will doing a couple of cycles fix this? Also, when I set my phone up I restored to a backup of my old 3G (running ios4.1) Would setting this up as a new phone see an increase in performance? Am I just paranoid?

I just played Fruit Ninja online and Epic Citadel for about 30 minutes altogether, with max brightness. During this time I dropped 7%.

Also, all of this has been on one charge. http://i903.photobucket.com/albums/ac239/powermapler/9716c762.jpg

That was taken before the Fruit Ninja/Epic Citadel.
 
powermapler said:
I got my iPhone 4 two days ago, and my battery life has been quite bad. (I think.)

With fairly heavy usage (3d games, internet browsing on wifi, youtube over wifi, music and push emails on, bluetooth off) I can only get about 5-6 hours of battery life doing this. No apps running in the background, brightness on half, location services off.

For example, last night I was on Gizmodo while listening to music. I could literally watch my phone dropping by 1% every 5-10 minutes. Is this normal?

Do I need to simply break my battery in? Will doing a couple of cycles fix this? Also, when I set my phone up I restored to a backup of my old 3G (running ios4.1) Would setting this up as a new phone see an increase in performance? Am I just paranoid?

I just played Fruit Ninja online and Epic Citadel for about 30 minutes altogether, with max brightness. During this time I dropped 7%.

Also, all of this has been on one charge. http://i903.photobucket.com/albums/ac239/powermapler/9716c762.jpg

That was taken before the Fruit Ninja/Epic Citadel.
Click to expand...

How many app were still running? And MAX brightness? why? That will kill your battery faster than running tomtom while on a 3G phone call.
 
Forgot to mention that I always kill apps I'm not using. (Aside from email and settings.)

I was only using max brightness for the last part of this to see how fast my battery drains. I usually use half-3/4 brightness.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

I will put in my .02...

My battery life has definitely gotten better over time. The first few days, my battery was under 20% when I went to bed but now a days it hangs around 40%...and I probably use it MORE often throughout the day then when I first got it. Just keep draining it down and then charge back up. I think you'll get there.
 
SidewaysTakumi said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

I will put in my .02...

My battery life has definitely gotten better over time. The first few days, my battery was under 20% when I went to bed but now a days it hangs around 40%...and I probably use it MORE often throughout the day then when I first got it. Just keep draining it down and then charge back up. I think you'll get there.
Click to expand...

This is what I was hoping for. :)

I'll keep at it, then. Would a restore to new phone do anything in this case?
 
5-6 hours with fairly heavy usage is bad? since when?

this must be your first smart phone.
 
lshirase said:
5-6 hours with fairly heavy usage is bad? since when?

this must be your first smart phone.
Click to expand...

No, I owned a 3G before this, and I'm not finding the battery usage to be much different. I really don't know what constitutes as heavy usage, though.

In the 6 hours I got out of it today, I'm going to say 2 hours was music, 3 hours were games, and 1 hour was internet browsing/emails. No texting or calling.
 
holy ****, 3 hours of gaming? i would be more than happy with 6 hours of usage....
 
I understand your frustration as im experiencing the same problem.

I drained my battery until the phone shut itself off last night, then put it back on charge to 100%

With 25mins of use, im down to 89% from 100% with push turned off

Is this normal ??

Usage = 27mins
Standby = 7hrs, 4mins
Battery Percentage = 88%
 
Here's today's usage:

72ac3fc8.jpg


Most of this was spent Browsing the Internet, playing Angry Birds/Fruit Ninja/I love Katamari, Facebook, and watching Youtube and Vevo. All the time I had music running in the background (aside from Youtube, of course.)

Brightness at 60% auto, Push emails on, no calling or texting, and no emails came in today. Bluetooth off, WiFi on and connected, 3G on and connected. Does all this seem normal?
 
Last edited:
powermapler said:
For example, last night I was on Gizmodo while listening to music. I could literally watch my phone dropping by 1% every 5-10 minutes. Is this normal?
Click to expand...

Are you serious?!?!? 1% every 5-10 minutes? you think thats BAD? You mean to tell me that if at 90% your usage was 50-100 minutes that would be bad?

powermapler said:
I just played Fruit Ninja online and Epic Citadel for about 30 minutes altogether, with max brightness. During this time I dropped 7%.
Click to expand...

You played a 3D video game for a half hour and you think its bad that it dropped a whopping 7%?!?! wow thats hilarious. You're either trolling or expecting way too much.
Im sorry but it blows my mind what people expect out of a phone.
 
roofy. said:
are you serious?!?!? 1% every 5-10 minutes? You think thats bad? You mean to tell me that if at 90% your usage was 50-100 minutes that would be bad?



You played a 3d video game for a half hour and you think its bad that it dropped a whopping 7%?!?! Wow thats hilarious. You're either trolling or expecting way too much.
Im sorry but it blows my mind what people expect out of a phone.
Click to expand...

+1
 
Roofy. said:
Are you serious?!?!? 1% every 5-10 minutes? you think thats BAD? You mean to tell me that if at 90% your usage was 50-100 minutes that would be bad?



You played a 3D video game for a half hour and you think its bad that it dropped a whopping 7%?!?! wow thats hilarious. You're either trolling or expecting way too much.
Im sorry but it blows my mind what people expect out of a phone.
Click to expand...

I couldn't agree more. The thing's a phone! Six hours is pretty good I think.
 
Heh. I can assure you I'm not trolling. I've just read of people getting battery life than this. But if this is normal, I'm 110% pleased with this. :D

Thanks for the help.
 
powermapler said:
Forgot to mention that I always kill apps I'm not using. (Aside from email and settings.)

I was only using max brightness for the last part of this to see how fast my battery drains. I usually use half-3/4 brightness.
Click to expand...
Just FYI, killing apps doesn't really do anything to help your battery life -- unless they specifically run in the background (I.E, pandora) but you could just turn it off instead.
 
TuffLuffJimmy said:
Ehhh why? For the most part an application doesn't use any resources other than when it's the focus application.
Click to expand...

MythicFrost said:
Just FYI, killing apps doesn't really do anything to help your battery life -- unless they specifically run in the background (I.E, pandora) but you could just turn it off instead.
Click to expand...

Alright, I didn't realize that. I assumed that it was running in the background to some degree. Although, if it took Apple this long to release multitasking, I guess they would have ironed it out to "perfection."
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

Yeh that's normal. I dot really mind because I always keep a charger on me
 
I actually find it amazing that with normal usage, this phone can easily last all day long. My palm pre would barely last half way through the day with the same usage. Im loving the battery life in my new iPhone.
 
brendu said:
I actually find it amazing that with normal usage, this phone can easily last all day long. My palm pre would barely last half way through the day with the same usage. Im loving the battery life in my new iPhone.
Click to expand...

Yes! Exactly the same here, I can go through a day with regular twitter/facebook checks, and go to bed with 70% left.
Pre would have lasted until lunchtime! Much better than my old iPhone 3G too
 
I usually get 10hrs of usage from my phone before it's in it's last few percent.
6hrs is pretty low IMO.
 
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