Push+WiFi = Battery Drain?

[rittchard]

The past week or 2 I had been seeing serious battery drain on my iPhone3G. At first I thought it was my imagination, or due to over usage of Apps or something. During this period I noted that I would hear the ding and buzz of new email pushing in more than I used to. For some reason after a recent restore, the way I set up my verizon/yahoo email became push (it wasn't like this before on my original iPhone). I didn't think much of it, until one night after charging nearly to full, the next morning the battery had drained to half!

I found this disturbing so I shut off both wifi and push, and now things seem back to normal (at least more similar to the old unit). Didn't lose much at all over night, or even through the whole day today. Of course I also upgraded to 2.0.2 last night, but I doubt that was a factor.

 

[PoitNarf]

This has happened to my 1st gen and 3G iPhones, although fairly infrequently. Sometimes it just uses the battery like crazy over night for no good reason. I've got my 3G set to check Gmail every 15 minutes and push for my work Exchange account. Leaving it alone overnight without it charging I don't see it dip at all on the battery meter. However when I'm at work, the battery will go down by 1/2 with me barely touching the thing. I'm guessing it's due to it having 1 bar or no service most of the time at my desk, the radio must be using a lot more juice to obtain and maintain a signal.

I just shut push off and reset the fetch schedule to 30 minutes, so hopefully I'll have better battery life tomorrow...

 

[rittchard]

Just in case anyone has had similar issues, I'm bumping this to note that after another full night of standby, the battery has gone down maybe 10% or less. So thus far, this has been a complete turn around in terms of battery life. Again, I don't know if the 2.0.2 update has helped as well or not.

 

[brentvw]

Push+WiFi = Battery Drain? AGREE 100%

I would like to corroborate this 100%.

I too was wondering why my iPhone would die around 2PM, sure enough... PUSH + WIFI.

I am on 3G iPhone. Sure enough a day or two later another iPhone user in the office approached me. "Man ever since you setup that WiFi connection with our push e-mail my battery DRAINS!!!"

We both turned off WiFi and left push on, he is 2G, i am 3G... needless to say we are back to 100% and full batteries.

PUSH + WIFI = DRAIN

 

[ki2594]

it seems like everyone here hasn't used a push/wifi phone before the iPhone. WITH ANY push+wifi phone the battery will drain.

 

[chanatown]

Yeah, I haven't even tried Push (probably b/c I don't use Yahoo mail.)

I do have 3G always on, Fetch every 30 min, and use Location Services sparingly (but keep it switched off). I can make it a whole day, with a decent amount of web surfing, music playing, and email checking. Honestly, I've been impressed with the battery life. Coming from a Windows Mobile device (Samsung i760), if I had done all of the things that I do with the iPhone with my i760, I would not come close to a full day's use.

I know it can be better, and we want to keep our expectations high, but I'm pleased thus far.

 

[PoitNarf]

Well I tried turning Push off, set fetch to 30 minutes for both email accounts. Little to no improvement... by 5PM my battery was 1/2 gone. Maybe it's the WiFi at work... we have a pretty extensive setup, easily over 80 APs, so maybe the iPhone is freaking out because of all the APs it has the potential to connect to throughout the day. I'm gonna put Push back on and fetch back to 15 minutes but keep WiFi off during the day unless I need to use it, crossing my fingers...

 

[daihard]

it seems like everyone here hasn't used a push/wifi phone before the iPhone. WITH ANY push+wifi phone the battery will drain.

Not sure about that. I do have WiFi on all the time, and I enable the push feature for my MobileMe mail (but not contacts/calendar). I leave home with a fully charged iPhone 3G in the morning (around 7 AM) and come home with it with still more than half full (around 5 PM). I do use my iPhone quite frequently at work - checking mail, playing games during breaks, etc.

 

[PoitNarf]

I'm not convinced push and wifi necessarily drains the battery just on its own. I've tried all different settings with it, turning push and wifi off at work, battery still shoots down by 1/2 by 5PM. I'm about 98% convinced it goes down this much because my iPhone spends about 1/3 of the work day with no service and the other 2/3 with 1 to 2 bars of signal. It's eating up all the juice trying to regain a signal when it's at no service and using more juice as well when it's trying to maintain whatever weak signal it is able to pick up. When I'm not at work and I've got at least 3 bars the battery seems to last much much longer. So... iPhone in concrete and steel buildings for several hours = significant battery drain.

 

[GfPQqmcRKUvP]

...At first I thought it was my imagination...

And why the hell would your imagination affect the battery runtime of your iPhone

 

[RITZFit]

It seems that I only started to have problems w/ PUSH after 2.0, but yeah, PUSH would kill my battery within a day of hardly any use...its off now.