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Oh I didn't knew that...But that was the same with the 4S as well and they restored the function with an later update...Either Apple just doesn't learn or there really is an hardware issue preventing it this time around.

I can toggle 3G on/off on my iPhone 5
 
Even doing "nothing" (phone is locked, etc.) on AT&T's 4G network (no LTE here yet) I've been losing 1-2% every few minutes. Once I switch to WiFi it goes back to normal. Hope this improves.

All phones do this that I've used. Want to see a battery's life really go down fast... go somewhere where you have no signal... it constantly searches for a signal.

----------

This is like a "no ****** sherlock" article... My iPhone 4, EVO 4G, and other phones I've had ALWAYS killed the battery when fighting for a signal, and the iPhone 5 is no different... I'd spend 2-3 hours in an area where the signal is low, and my battery would suffer, on ANY phone I've had.. unless it's just me...

It isn't just you
 
I can tell you my Battery life sucks on my 4 s it struggles to last the day and I make very little calls
 
Losing battery life quickly in marginal signal areas is no surprise.

The surprise to me is that Apple is so obsessed with thin thin thin thin that they have refused to upgrade their battery in years, despite all complaints lodged against iPhone battery life. Erma Gawd, just put in a bigger battery already!
 
After two conditioning charges, I managed to go ~36 hours till the phone died.

I charged the phone to 100% Sunday night. Unplugged around 7 a.m. Monday.

On Monday and Tuesday I used the phone as I normally do. Since I did not have my spare lightning connector, I did not plug the device in during my 20-30 min commute.

~1.5 Hrs talk
~1 GB of data over LTE (downloading some music and documents)
Using MOG player for music (mostly downloaded some streaming)
Watching a couple of videos on Youtube
Syncing one email account over exchange
Running 5-10 apps in the background constantly
A few iMessages/SMS
Using Siri for a couple of things like weather and news

~8 hrs standby on Monday night (did not charge)

Used the phone normally again on Tuesday and it finally died on me around 5 p.m.

I should mention that I have 3 and 4 bars on LTE at work. Coverage seems very good. In some places near my work, I am seeing 60 Mbps/20 Mbps up.
 
I am seeing my battery drop at a rate of about 1 percent every 2 or 3 minutes

I have iCloud Safari sync off and LTE disabled.

Same here.

I went to the Apple Store yesterday, and the Genius was very insistent that he's seen this before from bad restores, where the software thinks it's an earlier iPhone and thus not managing power right and draining fast. He says I need to restore it as a fresh iPhone and it will work fine. i.e. dump my iCloud backups.

This isn't very acceptable to me as I have a lot of apps with their own data stores, and I really, really don't want to lose my text message history of the last 3-4 years. But, I'll give it a shot after spending a couple hours backing up stuff tomorrow.
 
I, like other users, am seeing a 1% drop over the span of a couple of minutes. I've disabled location services for everything except Siri, and it really hasn't helped much. I'm hoping a few charge cycles fixes this.
 
More than the actual battery life I'm suprised at the discrepancy between Apple's claim and real-world testing. Didn't Apple boast at a keynote a few years ago that its battery life claims were based on realistic usage while competitors were disingenuous with their claims?

Realistic usage under ideal conditions (like having a tower next to where you are testing).
 
it's always the same marketing ***** with Apple

wanna get real life battery life ?

just the numbers announced during a keynote and remove 1/3 to it and you'll get the real battery life for iPod, iPad, iPhone and Mac

Really? cause when they released the 4s, I recall my battery actually lasting LONGER than what they advertised. It is different for everyone
 
LTE and signal strength sure play a factor, but there are other things that greatly affect battery life.
1. screen brightness. I'm surprised how many people jack up their brightness all the way up, and then complain about battery life. Turn it down to less than half and switch the auto brightness on. I have mine set at a quarter on my iPhone 4.

2. email fetching. The default setting is to fetch emails every 15 minutes. This can really affect battery life, especially if you have multiple email accounts and/or receive many emails regularly. I had short battery life on my iPhone 4 until I set all my emails to fetch hourly instead of every 15 minutes.
 
WHAT?! Marketing used only the most favorable data available to describe their product!? What is the world coming to?
 
In other news, water's wet.

Oh, also:
"the cellular antenna will struggle to maintain a signal"

The antenna won't struggle at all. It's a piece of metal. The radio might struggle to use the signal the antenna passively captures because it will be too weak. :p
 
My iphone 5 is my first apple product. I switched from a decade of blackberries. In my office I have very little service - 1 or 2 bars of 1g - not even Edge or 3G. (Verizon "o" service) I had the identical terrible service on my Blackberry in my office. My Blackberry would last a full 14 hour day and have 30% or so left. My iPhone is at zero - shuts itself off - after about six hours.

This is just viewing emails.

Very disappointing.
 
Pleased with Battery Performance sans LTE

I'm a new iPhone user. I found that the first day of use my battery performance was poor. I attributed that to LTE. After turning it off, I found that my battery over a 24-hour period was down to just 18% which I think is pretty reasonable. Included in the 24-hour period was about 90 minutes of Siri giving me turn-by-turn directions through my bluetooth headset, several phone calls, lot's of email, and a bit of texting.
 
I love the fanboy solutions.

1. Turn off LTE
2. Turn down brightness
3. Turn off Bluetooth
4. Turn off time zone tracking
5. Turn off location tracking
6. Wait 5 months for apple to get it right
7. It'll be fixed in iPhone 5s


How about you just turn off the phone and return it.

And some of the suggestions for saving the Andriod phone battery life are pretty much the same if I remember reading correctly on some of the post on this forum. Turn off LTE, wifi, blutooth, gps, lower brightness, etc... That is pretty standard for most smart phones regardless of model type. Unfortunately the andriod phones seem to need that more than the Apple phones though.
 
My iphone 5 is my first apple product. I switched from a decade of blackberries. In my office I have very little service - 1 or 2 bars of 1g - not even Edge or 3G. (Verizon "o" service) I had the identical terrible service on my Blackberry in my office. My Blackberry would last a full 14 hour day and have 30% or so left. My iPhone is at zero - shuts itself off - after about six hours.

This is just viewing emails.

Very disappointing.

one of the reasons I'm still on my trusty old blackberry. Despite it being a frustrating platform to use at times due to bugs and crashes (who hasn't had to pull the battery!).

but right now, on a 2 year old 9800, doing emails, browsing, bridged services to my playbook, listening to mp3's all day at work, I am barely using 40% of my blackberries battery. I only have to plug it in every 20-30 hours with my usage.

I've been following the tech world. I need to replace my BB eventually, But with even a max battery life of 8 hours under good conditions, it unfortunately puts the iphone5 out of running.
 
I am seeing my battery drop at a rate of about 1 percent every 2 or 3 minutes

I have iCloud Safari sync off and LTE disabled.

I was seeing similar issues as you, but I think I fixed it. I was losing 5-15% every hour from ZERO usage.
I had originally restored a backup from my 4s on to my 5, which some people apparently don't recommend.

So I synced calendars/contacts to icloud and did a full wipe. Set up my phone as new, manually installed all my apps again.
Went in to settings -> privacy -> location services -> system services, and set everything to off.
Also I deleted drawsomething, because it was sending me dumb alerts every 2 hours and I never play it anymore... so I figured may as well delete it instead of trying to mess with it's alerts.

Anyway. From 100% last night, I'm now at 98% with almost 8 hours standby, and 22 minutes of usage. Previously I would've expected to be more around 70% by now, even with barely any usage.

So... I went from being pretty sure I had a faulty phone to looking like it's more or less fine. I didn't disable LTE either.

I'm not sure which had the bigger impact, clean wipe or disabling all the system service BS. I guess I'll have a better idea at the end of the day, but this is looking much much better.
 
If you're in the L.A. area, consider yourself screwed.

In other news, Apple just released their "amazing", "magical" and "revolutionary" iPhone 5 product for black models:
 

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All phones do this that I've used. Want to see a battery's life really go down fast... go somewhere where you have no signal... it constantly searches for a signal.


My iPhone 4 didn't/doesn't do this. Not to this extent at least.
 
Realized it's off topic AFTER composing a TL;DR response

I am sorry if I confused you, my first post was a thought you saw I said "it is not anodized or if it is.... Naah they can't be so stupid" .
With this words I hoped that apple didn't go all the trouble to anodize the aluminum and then just coat it with a simple dye,you see this special dye on anodized aluminum doesn't just cover the aluminum but hmm how to say it(forgive my lack of words) ,it becomes one with the anodized aluminum so if you scratch it with keys (I am not saying to stab it with a knife or screwdriver) you will not see the silver of the metal but it will remain black since the dye is one with the anodized.
The dye doesn't just stay on top of the aluminum but gets "absorbed", so to peel off? Nope it can't be done.

Dude... it is clearly YOU who (after Geckotek's multiple attempts to clarify) is still confused.

Let me have a go at it...

Anodizing is like "gold plating." They start with the naked metallic-looking aluminum. (FORGET THE DYES for a second.) With "regular" anodizing, they do the anodizing process and a thin shell of "blackness" gets plated onto the phone. If you take something sharp to it, you can scratch that blackness off. It's not magically indestructible. It's normally used to keep things from corroding or rusting. But, in this case, Apple has most likely chosen it for aesthetic ("good-looking") purposes.

Again, with un-dyed anodized aluminum, you can scratch off the anodized material and see the shiny metal aluminum underneath. All anodized products behave this way. It's not kryptonite or unobtainium or any other indestructible material. In fact, sadly, it's not very resistant to scratches at all. That's why anodized non-stick pans are supposed to be used with non-metallic cooking utensils... it scratches off relatively easily.

The only time dyes come into play is when you want your anodized product to be some color other than dark grey or black. One of the linked articles showed a bright orange/red carabiner that had been anodized. If you don't use dyes, simple chemistry dictates that

aluminum + anodizing process --> dark grey / black product​

My guess is that Apple used NO DYE. However, knowing them, they probably wanted some very particular color -- "slate" in this case. So, they may have used some dye. BUT STILL... it just goes into the tank with the anodizing process. It just changes that "shell" from regular dark grey to special Apple-specified "slate" dark grey.

PLEASE tell me you understand now! Dyed or undyed, the anodized aluminum is still (very) scratchable. You'll see shiny metal aluminum if you go after it.
 
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