iOS5 and battery life

[gottafly]

i have a suspicion that the battery drain is related to the new iMessage app.

Question, for those w/ drain, have you sent messages to those w/ iOS5? (it may be locking in on "2 way messaging", ie. it's still linked to the person you are messaging as it's waiting for a " ... " reply.

For those w/o battery drain, have you texted to iOS5 recipient or just to others using regular SMS (without iMessage features), therefor, no "active link"?

Just a guess/observation....no flames necessary.

 

[cal6n]

Well, I've used iMessage between the UK and US. I don't have battery drain, although my standby time has been reduced.

 

[Young Spade]

i have a suspicion that the battery drain is related to the new iMessage app.

Question, for those w/ drain, have you sent messages to those w/ iOS5? (it may be locking in on "2 way messaging", ie. it's still linked to the person you are messaging as it's waiting for a " ... " reply.

For those w/o battery drain, have you texted to iOS5 recipient or just to others using regular SMS (without iMessage features), therefor, no "active link"?

Just a guess/observation....no flames necessary.

Interesting; I have great battery life and I have turned I-message off.

Although I'm not really sure if that would really be the case. It's only sending data instead of text, so the overall amount of processing power shouldn't be that great.

 

[vitzr]

My iP4 with all precautions taken gets just slightly less than it did on 4.3.x

Overall I think that's not bad.

 

[MooneyFlyer]

My update from today.

Charged the 4S side by side with my 3GS. Both on iOS5.

I took a call for 8 mins and had 1 hour of usage, 3:39 of standby -- currently at 85%. Not sure what 1 hour of usage is but I'll go with it. I did send about 10 text messages.

The 3GS in the same time has lost 4%. To be fair, I didn't do much on it -- but it has been searching for a 3G signal the entire time (supposedly drains the battery faster).

What have I proven? Jack ****. I still think it is discharging faster than it should be but I can't nail down why...

 

[coconutxyz]

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)

So is 3 min 1% normal for wifi surfing??iphone 3gs

 

[tnt220]

I Too had battery issues after upgrading my iPhone 4 from IOS 4.3.5 to IOS 5.

The upgrade went smoothly and everything was transferred perfectly, however my battery usage went from app 20% a day to +50% a day with no increased activity on my side and only wifi enabled (BT, Location services, iCloud notifications etc turned off).

Decided to try and go back to 4.3.5, but that didn't succeed and I had to reset to factory defaults with IOS5 after which I restored the backup made with IOS5. That restored my settings and apps, but all my music had to be placed back.

As mentioned I have location services turned off and have at no point seen the arrow indicating that locations services was active. I did however enable Location Services and in System Services set them all to OFF and turning Location Services off again. They system services should be disabled by turning off location services in general, but fact is that I had less processes running on my iPhone after turning them off.

Anyway after the restore and turning off system services my battery usage is now app 20-25% a day and that is way better than before.

So either a bad upgrade, System Services or a combination of both.

 

[jalex85]

Successful measure to bring battery back to normal

Hello.

I have an iPhone 4 and after I upgraded to ios5 EVERYTHING WAS NORMAL...

The battery lasted for 24 hours and then I decided to TURN ON WIFI SYNC.

After that, battery was lasting for 5 to 6 hours on standby mode.

I tried removing email accounts, network restore, notifications off, location services off etc.

Nothing worked but then I recalled that everything started when I activated WIFI SYNC.

So I decided to turn it off and voilá!

No more battery issues.

If you have WIFI Sync on, just open iTunes and look at it for 5 to 10 minutes... you will notice that iPhone connects to it for 1 or 2 seconds and then disconnects.

I assume it is a cycle and iPhone tries to connect permanently.

This worked like a charm for me.

I suggest you disable Wifi Sync, restore network and remove and add your email accounts.

According to what I've read these are the best shots.

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By the way...

To turn off Wifi Sync plug your iPhone to your computer, open iTunes, click on your iPhone on the left bar and uncheck Wi-Fi Sync.

 

[qap]

Wirelessly posted (Opera/9.80 (iPhone; Opera Mini/6.1.15738/26.984; U; en) Presto/2.8.119 Version/10.54)

Hello.

I have an iPhone 4 and after I upgraded to ios5 EVERYTHING WAS NORMAL...

The battery lasted for 24 hours and then I decided to TURN ON WIFI SYNC.

After that, battery was lasting for 5 to 6 hours on standby mode.

I tried removing email accounts, network restore, notifications off, location services off etc.

Nothing worked but then I recalled that everything started when I activated WIFI SYNC.

So I decided to turn it off and voilá!

No more battery issues.

If you have WIFI Sync on, just open iTunes and look at it for 5 to 10 minutes... you will notice that iPhone connects to it for 1 or 2 seconds and then disconnects.

I assume it is a cycle and iPhone tries to connect permanently.

This worked like a charm for me.

I suggest you disable Wifi Sync, restore network and remove and add your email accounts.

According to what I've read these are the best shots.

----------

By the way...

To turn off Wifi Sync plug your iPhone to your computer, open iTunes, click on your iPhone on the left bar and uncheck Wi-Fi Sync.

Same here, like I've already said in the first page!

Wifi sync off and my battery works like it should do!

Also I've noticed another thing, with wifi sync/connected the iPhone to the mac, if you eyect it from the Devices list in iTunes, it will AUTO-reconnect and come back in the devices list after 2-3 minutes and 100% alone, without do anything!!! Weird weird!

 

[tnt220]

Personally I never had wifi sync on and still had battery issues as mentioned in my post above.

 

[Ori]

I was losing 10% an hour on standby while doing nothing!
I tried restore, turning off everything everyone said.

I then stumbled upon find my iPhone. Turned that off and today it's running on 100% after 2 hours standby.

It might be a coincidence and the battery is now better conditioned, but the only way I will find out is if tomorrow I turn it back on.

I still suspect that all these battery issues, are ios5 issues.

 

[decafjava]

Funny I have not noticed any difference but then I don't use wifi sync. I always turn off cellular data as well at home as I have terrible data reception in my apartment. Maybe that helps.

 

[rmitchell248]

It is odd. I have a 32gb 4 and my wife has a 16gb 4. We both have iOS 5 loaded.

My phone runs the battery down at about twice the rate of hers. After about 1 hour off the charger in the morning hers will be at 98-99% and mine will be down to 94% both with very little usage.

By the evening I am running on power of less than 20 while she is still over 50-60%.

Before iOS 5 we would both be within 5% of each other at the end of the day. So what gets me is that we have the same phones same OS and different results. We both use iMessage have WIFI on mail settings are the same ect ect.

This changed literally overnight with the upgrade to iOS 5 last week.

 

[synagence]

Ok... WOW.....

Did my own experiment last night to see if it was a general bug or some kind of vampire draw eating at battery...

Went to bed around 11pm last night with airplane mode activated to disable all the antennas etc with a battery at 78% .... woke up around 7:30am with the battery on 76% .... so 8 hours later and 2% loss = 0.25% / hr = NOTHING

Turned airplane mode off ... did usual morning routing, got in the car at 9am, checked the battery .... 70%

So i lost 6% in 1.5 hours once OUT of airplane with the phone completely otherwise idle, only difference between night and day was airplane mode... nothing else

So i think there must be some kind of daily diag upload or other set of processes running thats burning the battery... no way is this normal

 

[Ori]

I was losing 10% an hour on standby while doing nothing!
I tried restore, turning off everything everyone said.

I then stumbled upon find my iPhone. Turned that off and today it's running on 100% after 2 hours standby.

It might be a coincidence and the battery is now better conditioned, but the only way I will find out is if tomorrow I turn it back on.

I still suspect that all these battery issues, are ios5 issues.

Scratch that......just dropped 20% in an hour with minimal use. I'm taking it to apple store.

 

[Thunderbird8]

OK, my 16GB iPhone 4 (about 9 months old) gets pretty consistent level of use each day. I rarely use wifi for more than a few minutes and mostly use the phone actually as a phone, and I also use text, safari and imessage.

I've noticed a definite increased battery drain time. I was a passenger in a car the other day and was using imessage on and off through a 30 minute journey. The battery dropped 5% during that time.

I reckon with my normal daily usage since upgrading to IOS5 the battery has finished the day a good 30% lower than before.

 

[tnt220]

My suggestion for a solution to the battery drain problem is this (worked for me as I went from +50% battery use in 24 hours to 20% use in 24 hours)

1. Sync phone running IOS5 to create a backup
2. Restore phone as new
3. Restore the phone from backup created in step 1

Have a hunch that certain configurations of IOS4 will when upgraded to IOS5 result in the increased battery use when the IOS4 settings backed up by the upgrade process are restored to IOS5.

 

[MooneyFlyer]

I think a bunch of this is because of calibration too. I charged my phone all night using the wall charger starting from about 16%. This morning it was at 100% as one would expect. I have used it a bit this AM but have NOT removed it from the charger and currently it is at 97% with the "plug" symbol signifying that it is not charging. Clearly there's something funky going on with both the actual battery life and the measurement of the battery usage/remaining charge.

It may take a number of full cycles to get the calibration in order I'm guessing. That could be why people are seeing improvements as time goes on.

edit: went to 94% while plugged in. Unplugged and replugged and it started showing the charge symbol again. In another thread someone just mentioned turning off auto-brightness. Trying that too.

 

[mcardlek]

anyone else have a ton of awdd messages in diagnostics

I too have had pretty poor battery life with my 4S. I restored the phone and set it up as new since this regularly fixes strange issues. I've added iCloud and exchange back on and every 2-6 mins an awdd message is in diagnostics. No idea what it is but I'm trying to figure out root cause.

I've completely discharged the phone twice to "calibrate it" and yesterday the phone was at 1% at 8:45

5 hours 20 mins of usage
14 hours 12 mins of standby

Mostly email/web and messaging for the day.

 

[Grayburn]

My 32GB IP4 is better on IOS5.

Before it died earlier i checked the usage and i had just over 7 hours of usage and just over 18 hours on standby.

It didn't get used though between 01:30 & 07:00 though.

 

[rdp5008]

My battery drained completely after 2 hours of being unplugged from the charger this morning. Normal usage that would have lasted me all day before upgrading to IOS5! Unacceptable!

 

[Thunderbird8]

OK this is ridiculous.

This morning my iPhone 4 chewed through 13% of battery power as I read my emails, sent a few imessages, and took 3 pictures.

All in about 45 minutes.

No wifi, only essential location services on (like maps).

 

[HishamAkhtar]

Same here

Notifications and location services are mostly turned off (except for the necessary ones) and my battery is literally in free-fall.

Has anyone noticed their phone is hot??

 

[SOLLERBOY]

I did a iCloud backup two days ago when I had the phone plugged in overnight. I just plugged the phone into the iMac to see if I had wifi sync enabled and while I was doing that, the backup bit said that the last completed iCloud backup was yesterday at 2:24pm. The iPhone says 19/10 @10:02PM.

maybe iCloud backup has gone rogue, I left the phone charging the night of the 19th and that is the last time it was plugged in. I'm experiencing a 30-40% loss a day with standby for 8 hours and usage for 1 hour.

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Notifications and location services are mostly turned off (except for the necessary ones) and my battery is literally in free-fall.

Has anyone noticed their phone is hot??

I got it out of my pocket the other day and it was hot, no multitasking, Location services or notifications, everything off.

 

[HishamAkhtar]

Turned off most of iCloud's features and my phone went through nearly 24 hours and only dropped to 52%