Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Come on...I've had every single iPhone since the original and NEVER had battery like this. That's a lame excuse at best. There is clearly an issue and Apple needs to address it ASAP.

I didn't say it wasn't an issue. However, I've had the 4S for 2 months, and my observation is that the battery drain seems to be exacerbated by the way it handles e-mail fetching. I wouldn't be surprised that the ultimate fix to the battery issues involves e-mail handling.
 
Come on...I've had every single iPhone since the original and NEVER had battery like this. That's a lame excuse at best. There is clearly an issue and Apple needs to address it ASAP.
To be fair, you probably never used the other model iPhones with iMessage, iCloud, and all of the new battery-draining, always-connected data features that came with iOS 5. I don't think any of them would get the same battery life you remember now.

Hopefully 5.1 can tweak some more battery life for you!
 
I agree the battery life is not great on this phone and it bugs the hell out of me but I have a new nexus and the battery life dies. It even comparable to the iPhone! Nor will it compete with it in any other area really. The screen is nice but the iPhone is still king! Had the skyrocket too and loved that phone buys the battery on this is even worse. I can't wait for the new iPhone so I can get lte again!
 
I didn't say it wasn't an issue. However, I've had the 4S for 2 months, and my observation is that the battery drain seems to be exacerbated by the way it handles e-mail fetching. I wouldn't be surprised that the ultimate fix to the battery issues involves e-mail handling.

lol, don't you love when people come online to b*tch about something or look for advice or w/e mission the OP is trying to accomplish... then when someone offers a very valid possibility (like email handling) they shrug it off "nah, no way man, you're crazy... I've been sending emails since Al gore invented the internet... email is NOT the problem..."

It's like, why did you even come on and post anything if you're going to tell people who are just trying to offer suggestions that their suggestions can't POSSIBLY be it...

OP, for what it's worth, the only time I saw excessive battery drain on my phone was when I tried to send myself 6 or 7 MB worth of pics to myself with 1 or 2 bars (in-and-out signal) via email. TOTALLY rocked my battery by about 10% in less than an hour. It just kept trying and trying. I've noticed that anytime I have a bad signal my phone dies much quicker. But hey, what do we know?
 
To be fair, you probably never used the other model iPhones with iMessage, iCloud, and all of the new battery-draining, always-connected data features that came with iOS 5. I don't think any of them would get the same battery life you remember now.

Hopefully 5.1 can tweak some more battery life for you!
This. The more cloud-based services on a device, the quicker the battery will drain. Also, if you're like me and have your contacts/calendar synced through GMail, turn off the contact/calendar syncing on iCloud. The fact that both are syncing will mean 2x the polling and 2x the drain. I found this after the contacts I was adding on my phone were suddenly not syncing to GMail when I would check my mail on my laptop.

Now the only settings I have set to on for iCloud are Find My iPhone and Backup. I just made the change tonight, so I'll have to see what impact it will have on my battery. Honestly, the only things I find useful for iCloud are those two settings... possibly Photo Stream, but any other part can be done as well or better with Google Sync/GMail.
 
I turned of iMessage and noticed a subtle increase in batt life...maybe 5-10 percent.
 
No worries.

It's nothing more than Apples way of giving us an incentive to buy the next model.

Look how well it worked last year. Antennagate begat Batterygate.

Apple is nothing if not clever :eek:
 
Location Services / Siri

OP,

Try looking at Settings -> Location Services.

You can then switch off location services that may be problamatic. I have turned OFF all the System Services which you will find down the bottom as 'Setting Time Zone' was known to be a problem in the past.

Any services that have used you location in the last 24hrs are shown in grey, whilst services currently draining the battery will be display with a purple icon next to them.

Also take a look at Settings -> General -> Siri and ensure 'Raise to Speak' is turned off. I found that improved my battery life a lot.

Please report back in this thread if this was of any assistance & Good Luck.
 
To be fair, you probably never used the other model iPhones with iMessage, iCloud, and all of the new battery-draining, always-connected data features that came with iOS 5. I don't think any of them would get the same battery life you remember now.

Hopefully 5.1 can tweak some more battery life for you!

This is a good point. I'll play with some of the iCloud and iMessage settings and see if I can find something that is screwing up the battery life.
 
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)

Take your phone into Apple. They replaced my 4S and this one has significantly improved battery life.

Before I could barely get 3 hrs of usage out of the damn thing. So far, this unit has 4.5 hrs of usage and 15 hours standby with 9% left.
 
I'm on my second 4S b/c of battery issues and the new device has the same issue as the first. I'm average about 4 hours of usage time which is totally "f ing" absurd. I'm starting to get really frustrated and have even began contemplating buying the GSM Galaxy Nexus for full price. I tried EVERYTHING to make battery time better and nothing worked. I wanted to see if the meter was possibly wrong so I just let it drain until it turned off. I just powered it back up (thus the 5% reading) but this is my usage time. Tell me what I could do!!

Mwhahahaha. You want a nexus becuase you want better battery life? Better read up son.
 
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)

Rocko1 said:
I'm on my second 4S b/c of battery issues and the new device has the same issue as the first. I'm average about 4 hours of usage time which is totally "f ing" absurd. I'm starting to get really frustrated and have even began contemplating buying the GSM Galaxy Nexus for full price. I tried EVERYTHING to make battery time better and nothing worked. I wanted to see if the meter was possibly wrong so I just let it drain until it turned off. I just powered it back up (thus the 5% reading) but this is my usage time. Tell me what I could do!!

Mwhahahaha. You want a nexus becuase you want better battery life? Better read up son.

5 hrs of straight usage is perfectly acceptable considering iCloud, Siri, etc.
 
you didn't even try to look at other threads...


Obvious troll

Not only did I look at other threads but I posted in them. I think this issue needs to be vocalized even further so that Apple realizes what a major issue this is to so many people. And how could I be a troll when I'm posting screenshot proof of my issue? Do you even know what a troll is?
 
Last edited:
I have to believe with the gazillion battery threads on various forums that they've noticed that 5.0.1 wasn't a silver bullet. This is a bigger deal than deleting a single photo out of photo stream and they're about to slam dunk that one.
 
Come on...I've had every single iPhone since the original and NEVER had battery like this. That's a lame excuse at best. There is clearly an issue and Apple needs to address it ASAP.

Are you actually looking for help or are you just complaining about the battery life?

Adjust push notifications
location settings
which apps use location

Many apps will continue to use location information when they're closed...navigation apps, the reminders app if geofencing is used. Observe the arrow up on the status bar by the battery indicator. if it's on it's using gps

brightness level. of course.
bluetooth on/off

and as pointed out. there are hundreds of posts addressing this question already. that is, if you're actually looking for solutions.
 
Just recently activated my 4S, getting its first full charge today. Question: Is dropping 5% overnight (8 hours) bad?

I wish my 4s would only drain that much! on ios5, it stared at 15% loss overnight, i changed some settings and it thankfully it improved to only 5% loss.

I updated to IOS 5.0.1, and it made it worse, now back up to losing 12% a night. In hindsight, I should have stayed on ios 5 but i thought 5.0.1 had other bug fixes and I like to keep up to date so went for it.
 
I wish my 4s would only drain that much! on ios5, it stared at 15% loss overnight, i changed some settings and it thankfully it improved to only 5% loss.

I updated to IOS 5.0.1, and it made it worse, now back up to losing 12% a night. In hindsight, I should have stayed on ios 5 but i thought 5.0.1 had other bug fixes and I like to keep up to date so went for it.

Well that's good to hear, despite you having problems with yours. I'm sorry. I guess I'll be able to see how my battery is after a real full charge. I'm also on 5.0.1. If you think your battery is bad, take it to Apple. They'll run diagnostics to see if the battery is operating normally. And if it's not, they'll replace it no questions. The only thing that's sort of bothersome is the fact that some people are reporting great batt life and some arent, hopefully it's not a hardware issue! Then again, everyone uses their phone differently.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.