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iPhone 4S is really a dumb phone

M

MultiMediaWill

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Aug 1, 2010
1,634
378
Minneapolis
Ever since I have got my 4S, the battery life has been terrible. I have been lucky to get 2 hours of battery life a day. The only way to squeeze a few extra hours are to do all of this:

  • Disable Weather and Stock widgets in Notifications.
  • Disable Location Services for Reminders.
  • Go to Settings - Location Services - System Services and set Setting Time Zone, Location-Based iAds, Diagnostics & Usage to OFF.
  • Disable spotlight search.
  • Check your locations services settings.
  • Ping used to cause battery drains
  • Diagnostics & usage and select Don't send.
  • Use fetch rather than push for you email accounts.
  • Turn off bluetooth
  • Turning "Raise to speak" for Siri off.

After doing all the above I finally got some normal battery range. However, doing all those steps turns the phone from being a smart phone to being a dumb phone. The iPhone 4S has some serious issues and a full scale recall is the only option I can think of. It's not like the can give away free batteries...
 
Tough luck. Doesn't really have anything to do with the phone, though.

My battery life was bad, but went from horrific to better than my iPhone 4 overnight.
 
I don't have problems with the iPhone 4S so far sure I got some of the stuff off like stocks and ping cause I never use them , spotlight search is on and so Siri , push email for 2 accounts and Manuel for other too accounts , and still get thru a whole day, maybe your using the phone more then 4 hours a day ? Who knows I'm happy with my phone so far and I check twitter ever half and hour or less
 
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A full scale recall? What planet are you from?
 
I am getting 14 hours a day with only disabling the weather and stocks from the notification pane and the diagnostics and usage, location based iAds and traffic in location services.

Everything else is on including bluetooth.
 
they rushed this out and put a dual processer on this one, doubling the power from the original one, what'd u expect?

still bought it anyways, my 3gs was breaking apart. still a better done than the original 4, besides the dual processor, 1080p camera, 64 gigs, and bout 4-5 mb slower speed than 4g.

once u have it for a while, i doubt that ill be using it a lot. unless ur waiting around or doing nothing for long periods of time during the day
 
My battery has no problem lasting the full day on normal usage.

With heavy usage (e.g., gps + streaming video + more), it seems to give me about 4-5 hours.
 
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)

I have every feature on cept blutooth. Brightness bout 65%. Use it non stop all day music web browsing games youtube and i get a day and a half easily with my 4s.
 
Maybe something is wrong with yours? I have almost everything at the defaults, and push email for 2 accounts, and it lasts the whole day under moderate use.
 
i'm happy with mine as is..i turned off ping and push but that was just to be safe, i had no issues with them on, but i figured why not since i don't use either service.


lifes too short to be so picky and easily disappointed. just be happy man.
 
None of these are related to 4S directly. The battery issues are iOS 5 related. Location based reminders are the worst. Set one up and your phone will be dead in a few hours.

If you turned something off that you actually need to use, then turn it back on :) If you need spotlight search for example, turn it back on, but maybe go through the list of things to index. Same for notifications and locations. i.e. I don't want all my games to use locations or notifications, then why not turn them off.

This guide is not about making your iPhone dumber, but to outline the things that affect battery most. You can hand pick the features you don't need and turn them off. I turned off locations for reminders, for example. I will turn them back on if the issue is fixed in the future, but I haven't really used the feature enough to miss it, so I am not losing anything and gaining battery life.
 
You didn't have to turn off all that stuff to get good battery life but the only thing that needed turning off is the battery percentage toggle. Look who's dumb???
 
Sorry you are having a problem, but a "full scale recall"?

Mine works just fine. I have everything enabled (bluetooth, wifi, push email with 3 accounts, fetch email with 4 accounts, location services, search - etc.), and my battery life is excellent.

I usually end the day with 40%.

I suggest you try resetting and "setup as new", that frequently solves battery problems. If that doesn't do it, take it to an Apple store for replacement.
 
I have had no problems with battery life here. I can easily get two days out of a charge with casual use: an hour of phone calls, facebook, web browsing, ebook reading...etc. I haven't bothered turning anything off. It is really curious to see how many people are getting poor usage out of the battery. Guess I got lucky.
 
Have everything turned on. Phone battery lasts pretty much all day with lots of texting and moderate safari use.
 
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