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I'm noticing heavy battery drains also, I have also noticed the charge time is seriously faster than previos firmwares so I'm wondering if theres a major bug with battery
 
I'm noticing heavy battery drains also, I have also noticed the charge time is seriously faster than previos firmwares so I'm wondering if theres a major bug with battery

Same...here is something weird & funny...

My battery was at 93% and i did a hard reset (home+power button) for no reason & when i turned it back on it was at 97%...how the F does that happen?

That 97% is what it was like before 4.2.1 back on 4.0 & 4.1...very strange
 
i sent 3 txt messages real fast & already down 1-2%, stupid...never drained so fast before, man i should learn my lesson & just never upgraded from 4.1, worked perfect.

have you tried recalibrating the battery? as i said in my posts, on the beta & GM people were saying the battery was draining fast, but after recalibrating, it was as good as normal, if not better. it's kinda like it misreports how much battery is left, so you think it's draining quicker, but it's really not.
 
have you tried recalibrating the battery? as i said in my posts, on the beta & GM people were saying the battery was draining fast, but after recalibrating, it was as good as normal, if not better. it's kinda like it misreports how much battery is left, so you think it's draining quicker, but it's really not.

Can you show us how please? :)
 
I was having battery drainage issues after 4.1. But now with 4.2.1 the battery seems to be better like it was under 3.1.3.
 
my battery has been the same throughout the updates even as of now running 4.2.1
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Since 4.2 my battery has gotten worse. My
Phone used to last a day and a half. Now it lasts half a day.
 
I went straight from factory-installed launch-day 4.0 up to 4.2.1 installed via official iTunes release with no jailbreaking.

I'd say my battery is definitely no worse than it was with 4.0 and I suspect that it might even be a bit better. I'm still at 59% so I'm not far enough down yet to really make a good judgement but I already have 4 hours 36 minutes of usage and 2 days 17 hours of standby so that seems pretty good to me. Brightness set to about 65% (under the "e" in "Brightness") and no music usage or phone calls, it's mostly WiFi browsing with a tiny bit (a couple of minutes) of 2G mobile data access.

I'm sorry to hear about those of you who are having issues though. Battery life is something that I'm pretty obsessed with (hence my keeping my phone locked to 2G) and I'd most definitely be upset if I was seeing what some here are reporting.

- Julian
 
Don't most people charge there phone before they go to bed?

If you can make it through the whole day of work and play, does it really matter if OMG my phone went from 93% to 91% after a few texts and emails?

Shut off the percentage label for the OCD
 
Don't most people charge there phone before they go to bed?

If you can make it through the whole day of work and play, does it really matter if OMG my phone went from 93% to 91% after a few texts and emails?

Shut off the percentage label for the OCD

My phone won't make it through the day without being recharged and is now worse with this release.
 
Don't most people charge there phone before they go to bed?

If you can make it through the whole day of work and play, does it really matter if OMG my phone went from 93% to 91% after a few texts and emails? ...
I'm trying to adjust to the above but I started using PDAs in 1999 and one thing that I really liked about my first Palm V is that I could easily go away on a long weekend, use my device for at least 12 hours while I was away, and not even have to think about needing to recharge it. I still have that in my head as the first base for smart phones really cracking the battery life issue.

The above isn't a fair comparison because the iPhone is doing so much more than a PDA, it's a phone for a start let alone the beautiful screen, WiFi and all the other stuff, but it's still a data point lodged in my mind.

On the flip side, there are some really tiny chargers out there to travel with and if I'm visiting friends then it's almost inconcievable that they won't have something capable of charging an iPhone. The last time I got caught short with power it turned out that, even though my hosts weren't iPhone users, the cheap rubbishy plasticy mini hi-fi system that they had in the kitchen just happened to have an iPhone dock on it.

- Julian
 
Seems like it's the wifi killing the battery. I fully charged my phone at 11pm and let it sit overnight with wifi turned off (I usually have it turned on), woke up at 730am and the battery still at 100%.
Now I'm at work with wifi on and the battery is dropping 1% about every 30mins and I haven't used the phone.
Can anyone who feels the battery is improved on 4.2.1 confirm you have wifi on/off all the time??
 
My 3G battery life is worse and you know what? I could care less at least the damn thing works like it should now. id rather have a phone that works and eats the battery than one that gives me nothing but the spinning wheel of death!!!

iOS4.2 on 3G? Hell ya
 
Seems like it's the wifi killing the battery. I fully charged my phone at 11pm and let it sit overnight with wifi turned off (I usually have it turned on), woke up at 730am and the battery still at 100%.
Now I'm at work with wifi on and the battery is dropping 1% about every 30mins and I haven't used the phone.
Can anyone who feels the battery is improved on 4.2.1 confirm you have wifi on/off all the time??
Mine has WiFi on all the time but I do have all push and fetch turned off, I don't even have email accounts set up on it, so maybe my phone tries to use the WiFi connection less than yours.

- Julian
 
Mine has WiFi on all the time but I do have all push and fetch turned off, I don't even have email accounts set up on it, so maybe my phone tries to use the WiFi connection less than yours.

- Julian

I have push and fetch turned off as well..
 
I have push and fetch turned off as well..
I checked on my phone last night. I went to bed about 1:00am and the battery was at 41%. I checked it this morning at about 10:30am and the battery was at 37% so that's a 4% drop overnight. On your previous post of your dropping 1% every 30 minutes then I would have expected you to have lost 18% in that time, i.e. draining 4.5 times as fast as mine.

When I first got my iPhone I did a few checks on this before and my overnight drain on launch-day 4.0 was more like 6% so for me the WiFi drain while inactive seems to have improved with 4.2.1 vs 4.0.

I have always noticed that if I do switch off WiFi completely overnight then the drain does drop to almost zero (or maybe 1% drop) overnight but I'm afraid that I can't provide you with a data point to reinforce your hypothesis. This doesn't necessarily mean you should reject your hypothesis, it could be that on your particular phone it is something in the WiFi stack that has got itself into a funny state and is draining power. Maybe a restore from new might be the next step? That seems to be what lots of people suggest in these situations although I've never needed to do it myself (luckily, because it sounds like a real pain).

Good luck with sorting this out.

- Julian
 
I'll make a second battery report here and say that my 3GS is doing awesome with the battery usage on 4.2.1. Every night I put it on the charger before bed and when I get up it's fully charged and ready to go. Yesterday was no different and I used my phone off and on all day like usual. Only lately I haven't been using Skype. On 4.1 with Skype on the battery would drain quite fast and I'd have to put it on the charger at least once during the day because of it along with the other usual tasks I do.

But yesterday with Skype on for a few hours toward the end of the day the battery was still reporting 88% left! Skype barely made a dent in the battery use.

I am once again pleased with the performance of my 3GS.
 
I though that I was going crazy, lol. It has seemed like my iPhone 4's battery life on 4.2 has been cut rather short... I hope that they find a fix for this soon...
 
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