Apple iPhone 4S 'drains battery' too quickly complaints

[3GScottishUser]

The BBC reports that:

The battery life of Apple's new iPhone 4S is under scrutiny after thousands of users reported problems.

In some cases, people claimed that their phone battery was draining by up to 15% every hour, even when the device was not being used.

Users who have installed Apple's new operating system - iOS 5 - on older models have also reported problems.

Apple told the BBC it had no comment on the issue.

The problems have generated a huge amount of discussion on Apple's forums.

Scarface from New Jersey summed up the view of many: My iPhone 4s battery seems terrible!"

CripinUK went into more detail: "I have an iPhone 4 and since putting iOS 5 on it the battery life has been really bad it drops at a ridiculous rate even when I'm not using it where as it would barely drop any charge when it was in standby."

"I've tried turning lots of thing off but it makes no difference. I've been looking around and a lot of people seem to be reporting this," he said.

The iPhone 4S has a built-in rechargeable lithium-ion battery. It is supposed to provide up to eight hours of 3G talk time (14 hours of 2G) with standby time of up to 200 hours.


Full Article: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15559721

[Hands0n]

This is more an iOS 5 problem than a iPhone 4S one. That much is validated by the same issue hitting those with iPhone 4 and 3GS that have updated to the new OS.

I have not experienced any problem with my iPhone 4 with iOS 5 since updating it.

A possible solution has been cited on Mashable, one that makes perfect sense

Haslam reports that after turning off the “Setting Time Zone” toggle within the “System Services” section of “Location Services” (in the Settings app) has nearly doubled his phone’s battery life and increased standby time nearly three-fold.

Full article: http://mashable.com/2011/10/31/ios-5-battery-fix/?WT.mc_id=obinsite

I checked my own settings and the Time Zone toggle was set to on, but according to the iPhone there was neither a purple or grey icon apparent on any of my location settings, most of which were set to On. That means that my particular iPhone had not been quietly using Location Services, that would cause battery drain.

Like all of this good stuff, my advice is always to turn off anything that you don't use or need. Unfortunately the manufacturers in their own wisdom decide to turn this stuff on by default. That would be fine when battery technology finally catches up with demand, if ever.

[Hands0n]

And having just posted the above it seems that Apple have coughed up and will be issuing an update to iOS 5.0 http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/apple-iphone-4s-battery-issues-due-to-ios-5-bugs-update-coming.ars

[Ben]

Interesting, that setting has a purple arrow next to it for me, but I have no problems with battery life.

Still, the update will be welcome to those who are struggling.

[DBMandrake]

When I first updated my 3GS to iOS 5 I was getting rapid battery drain - it would be dead in about 8 hours with hardly any use, I mucked around with a few settings but couldn't solve it, did a full restore and it's been fine.

There is no doubt that there are one or more bugs in iOS 5 that are causing rapid battery drain in some very specific circumstances, (which is why its so hard for different people to reproduce consistently) and as Hands0n mentioned Apple are already working on a 5.0.1 update that includes battery related bugfixes. (A Beta of the update has gone out to developers already, so expect it in 2-3 weeks)

As far as the System Services Location settings go - mine had a permanent purple arrow next to "Setting Time Zone" in System Services Location as well, despite battery life being ok. I turned it off yesterday and there has been a noticeable improvement in battery life, although it was by no means bad before. Worth doing I think, until the update comes out.

Ben - as far as I know, "Setting Time Zone" does not use the GPS, it just uses Wifi and cell tower triangulation, as it's basically just trying to determine your time zone based on your location - and high accuracy is not required for that. (nearest state or country is enough!) Still, it does use some small amount of power to do even a wifi/cell location fix, and if the bug is that it is doing it repeatedly through the day turning it off may help.

Hands0n - if you don't have the purple or grey icon next to that setting, it probably means you don't have "Set Automatically" enabled under General->Date & Time.

From my testing it seems that turning off the "Setting Time Zone" under location doesn't disable automatic syncing of date and time from the GPS satellites, (which is only done about once every 48 hours) but would disable automatic time zone setting based on location - only useful if you travel abroad between time zones, so if you don't it should be fine to disable it.

One other little tweak I've found that may or may not save a little bit of battery life is turning off "local weather" in the notification screen. By default the weather widget displays "Local" weather based on an approximate (wifi/cell) location fix - and from what I can see it does a location fix every single time I slide down the notification centre screen - which I do a LOT. (The location arrow shows up for a few seconds every time) Each time will use a small amount of power for that fix.

Again this seems like a bug to me - even if you are looking up the local location to check the weather, don't look up the location every single time! At most, re-confirm your location every 15 minutes or so so that if you're pulling down notification centre a lot its not constantly doing location lookups.

Rather than disabling the weather widget (which I like) I found a way to turn off the location check. Go into the normal Weather app and hit the small (i) in the bottom right corner, then turn off "Local Weather". This gets rid of the local weather option in both the weather app and notification screen.

Now the notification screen will always show the weather of the most recently selected location in the weather app - so just scroll the weather app to your home town and the widget will always display that town and not do a location lookup every time.

PS I tried charging my 3GS up yesterday evening then leaving it off the charger overnight - it dropped from 100% to 93% in 8 hours, and that's with several push email accounts enabled, so I think that's pretty good. Before I re-did the restore, 8 hours of standby would have dropped down below 40%, with the phone being slightly warm whilst supposedly "idle", so that's the sort of huge discrepancy we're talking about with these power management bug(s)...

[The Mullet of G]

I decided to perform a restore on my 4S, as I had a couple of niggles on the first day of use. I suspect this was due to activating the phone while at work and restoring my content via iCloud. While it is indeed possible to activate and restore your iPhone without a PC, I suspect there might be a couple of teething issues.

So far I haven't noticed any real changes, although my firmware version changed from 5.0.1 (9A405) to 5.0.1 (9A406) even though I checked for updates beforehand and it said there was none. Also my data speeds are noticeably better, almost double infact, ping times are still massive though but thats just Vodafone.

Just out of interest what sort of data speeds are you guys seeing?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v402/themulletofgod/IMG_1391.png
PS. I tried to use the attachment thing on here for my pic, but it was fail. :)

[DBMandrake]

So far I haven't noticed any real changes, although my firmware version changed from 5.0.1 (9A405) to 5.0.1 (9A406) even though I checked for updates beforehand and it said there was none. Also my data speeds are noticeably better, almost double infact, ping times are still massive though but thats just Vodafone.

Apparently the 9A406 build is to fix a "No Sim" error, so presumably it includes a baseband update. Because the version number is the same (5.0.1) the only way of getting it if you were already on 5.0.1 is doing a restore. See the following:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/16/new-ios-5-0-1-build-9a406-intended-to-fix-no-sim-card-errors-on-iphone-4s/

[The Mullet of G]

Apparently the 9A406 build is to fix a "No Sim" error, so presumably it includes a baseband update. Because the version number is the same (5.0.1) the only way of getting it if you were already on 5.0.1 is doing a restore. See the following:

http://www.macrumors.com/2011/12/16/new-ios-5-0-1-build-9a406-intended-to-fix-no-sim-card-errors-on-iphone-4s/

Yeah I knew that 9A406 was out and what it fixed, I'm pressuming it was probably also available OTA? But being the jailbreaking sort I don't normally check for OTA updates.

The restore unfortunately hasn't done much for my iPhones battery, but playing GTA3 and constantly winding SIRI up probably isn't helping. Apple really should have beefed the battery up, as I felt it was weak in the iPhone 4, and it isn't fairing any better this time around with faster hardware to power.

[Ben]

Seconded, Apple did need to beef the battery up. I've taken to a Mophie Juice Pack for when I know I'll be out and about and using my phone heavily; doubling the battery seems to double the amount I use it rather than the amount of time it lives for, which surely means usage of the iPhone is being held back by the battery constraints, at least for me.

[The Mullet of G]

I'm concerned with the health of my 4S battery, I've been using Battery Logger for a few weeks, and my 4S battery is already in worse shape than the battery in my 14 month old iphone 4. :(

[Hands0n]

Have you tried a battery re-calibrate? Sometimes the logic around the battery meter goes flaky and a full cycle often sorts it out. Happened to my iPad 2 recently and one full drain followed by a full charge worked. It reports correctly again.

[Ben]

Not used Battery Logger, what sort of stats/output does it give you?

I think the 4S battery 'just' passes in terms of providing useful battery life. Apple's next iPhone needs to provide longer battery life or it'll start to become a barrier to usage and, quite honestly, power users will get fed up and move on.

Mophie Juice Pack still working brilliantly for me, by the way. Really useful when I know I'll be out and about, taking lots of pictures and videos, sending lots of messages.

One thing... I download a lot via iTunes, and this downloads automatically to my iPhone and iPad. I often leave my iPad in my bag at night if I'm not using it, rather than charge, as typically it gets great battery life. But if I forget and have an iTunes splurge the iPad sits there downloading everything and loses a chunk of its battery life. iCloud is a pretty big extra drain IMHO. But I can't turn it off, I love it too much :D

[DBMandrake]

I still think its iOS 5.0.1 that's causing excessive battery drain.

The battery life on my 3GS has gone downhill considerably (maybe 20-30%) ever since I updated from iOS4, and going from 5.0 to 5.0.1 actually made it worse not better.

Looking at the system log shows all kinds of error messages, timeouts and so on which give me the strong impression that there are some serious bugs with both power management and systems services that are not sleeping when they should be.

At work I have to keep my phone off except during my breaks so my phone is on in the morning on the way to work, on for a total of an hour of breaks through the day, on on the way back home and off the rest of the middle of the day, yet by dinner time its down to 60% or so despite the phone being off most of the working day... :(

Crossing my fingers that 5.1 can make an improvement, sadly in the last year iOS has been getting more and more buggy. The last really stable, fast version of iOS with good battery life was 3.1.3. Ever since then its been more and more features but also more and more bugs...

[Ben]

I really don't find iOS buggy these days... apart from the battery life I don't have any issues with it. That said, I can't imagine it performs so great on the 3GS?

[DBMandrake]

Well, when I first upgraded the 3GS to iOS 5.0 performance wasn't really any worse than 4.x.

It's now ridiculously slow though, there is something very very wrong with the memory management in 5.0.1. Almost every day it becomes sluggish to the point where it pauses for 5-10 seconds at a time when launching an app, or trying to switch between screens in an app. Even trying to launch the SMS app and start typing a message can be a 10+ second delay before it will start responding and reacting to my key presses.

If I use the task killer to force quit one or more large recently run apps the performance immediately jumps back up to normal, so its not a CPU speed issue, its a memory management problem. iOS is supposed to force quit apps not recently used if system memory gets too low, but I can see from apps like "System Status" that free memory is getting as low as 4MB with no attempt by the OS to free up memory by quitting background apps.

Because the 3GS only has 256MB, this is much more of an issue than the iPhone 4/4S. It really does seem to me that Apple either has the memory freeing threshold set too low, (by the time you only have 4MB of ram free of course things are going to run sluggish) or there is some sort of memory leak that is running free memory right down all the time, as a fairly brief period of use switching between a few apps gets free memory down to 4MB or so where it stays.

Considering they're still SELLING the 3GS right now, I really hope they get their act together and fix this memory management issue.... :(

[Ben]

Indeed, the 3GS is still selling pretty damn well too. Have you tried doing a full restore on the thing? Doesn't sound too nice to use at the moment.

Think you'll upgrade when the 5 comes out?

[Hands0n]

It is just as likely to be the apps at fault rather than the OS itself. If I remember the coding basics of Objective-C one of the things the developer is responsible for is freeing up memory that they've used when they're finished with it.


There are only 4 basic rules when it comes to memory management in Objective-C:

If you own it, release it.
If you don’t own it, don’t release it.
Override dealloc in your classes to release the fields that you own.
Never call dealloc directly.
That’s it. The first two are the most important and we’ll get into the basics of object ownership next.

Source: http://interfacelab.com/objective-c-memory-management-for-lazy-people/

I have seen many instances of apps with poor memory management causing "resource leaks" and eventually bombing out or causing other issues. And I'm not talking about the script kiddie apps but those that should be professionally developed such as Facebook, Twitter and others.

Apps are also getting larger in terms of code base but also in memory requirements. So it is not entirely surprising the behaviour seen in the 3GS. If it is of any comfort I can attest to much of that with the iPhone 4 where I have observed a distinct throttling of performance over time. Restarts and restores have no particularly long lasting beneficial effect.

Android seems to suffer from this to a greater or lesser degree also, where older, less capable devices struggle to run the later OS and apps very well.

[Ben]

If there's one thing I can say about the iPhone 4S it's that it performs really well. I don't have issues with any of my apps... they're fast and reliable, which is nice. I think that's why I was surprised to hear DBMandrake call iOS buggy! I do get the sense that apps are 'inflating', though - for good and bad reasons. They're getting ever more functional, more useful, increasing their scope. But they're no doubt getting more bloated and overcomplicated, too.