Anyone else getting low battery life with IOS 5?

When IOS 5 came out, i began to get lower battery life on my iphone 4. I at first thought it was due to my increased use of the new operating system. A week later, when I went back to normal usage, which lasted me 3 days and some, i now barely get maybe 2 days. All apps are closed frequently, so idk if its just me. I'm just worried at battery degradation.

 

I've had no noticeable change of battery life after upgrading...

 

It's been a week since iOS 5 was released. At what point on the timeline did you begin normal usage? I'm not experiencing any difference, but i have a few ideas.

Here are some potential issues:

- maybe there is some software defect that isn't affecting everyone. Wait it out or do a restore install.

- you say that a week later you went back to normal usage, and battery life was reduced to about 2 days from 3. The issue is that the timing of this doesn't add up at all, and points toward you using some prerelease version of iOS 5. That would be an obvious issue. In this case, do a restore install from iTunes.

 

It's all the new stuff with GPS that drains the most "additional" power... like:
Reminders and Find my Friends

...at least it's what I could (temporarily) fix by disabling that...

but I don't mind charging it every night... so I enabled everything agin Both give me some benefits worth the "less time"

Edit: just in case: I installed iOS5 by "restore" so it's a fresh install and used my iOS 4.x.x backup to get everything back as it should be This should be the "better" solution... it's like a fresh windows install after some years...

 

I don't know if its my 4S or a change in iOS5, but at least on my 4S, having bluetooth enabled drops the battery by 2 to 3 times more than I ever noticed on my iPhone 4 with iOS 4. Now I've gotten in the habit of turning it off except when I'm in my car, since thats the only place I use it.... and by the end of the day I have about 20% more battery left.

 

Iphone 4 here and no loss in battery...still get the typical 1-2 days running a bunch of apps.

 

Do use reminders and/or Find my Friends?

That is strange... doesn't the 4S has BT 4.0? (which should use less power)

... but as far as I know the 4S is "worse" at power / batterie life
EDIT: => 4S 200h standby, 4 300h of standby

 

I had the same issue, and it annoyed me so much, I created a blog for it:

MAX²

 

It's all about compromises... you could disable 3G as well and go with Edge... or GPS data with photos... but in the end the easiest way is to use airplainmode for those who need an SOS device

 

I have some other thoughts.

1. Maxsquared suggests turning off time zone location and weather location system services. I disagree with at least the weather, and I will explain why. I don't know enough about what the time zone location service does, but I'll take a guess and voice my thoughts.

2. OP notes that he zealously closes all running applications. I recommend to stop doing this and see if your battery life improves. I will also explain why.

---

1. Why you should leave weather location "on" (or: why it isn't extremely important to turn it off)

With 3g vs. edge, there was a big issue because data connection over the network was either constant or very regular, and 3g was killing off the battery because it was being used even when the phone was on standby mode (locked with the screen off, not being used - granted Edge was active as well, but used much less power). Weather, however, only updates when you are looking at the weather. It uses the CoreLocation API, but that doesn't mean that it is activating the GPS on standby mode, or any other time. This is important. To be clear, I don't think that weather activates the GPS *at all*. Weather picks up only your general location based on the cell tower you are registered to, which pretty much costs you nothing in terms of battery life. I don't even think it asks the tower for the general location data until you register at a new cell tower AND launch the weather app / notification center again.

Each time you look at weather, you will get the symbol notifying you that weather is accessing your location, but I'm pretty sure their implementation minimizes hardware usage. I read through the API, and it seems to be set up this way. That location notification on the menu bar is primarily to you alert you of your location is being accessed by an application for privacy concerns, but it doesn't give you any definite information about how it is acquiring that location - whether you are actively using GPS or cell triangulation / registration info, or wifi triangulation. The biggest thing to take away from all this is that it seems like weather will have 0 affect on battery life while the phone is on standby, regardless of how you have it set up. I think the affect will still be marginal even if you use the notification center frequently. Every time you use notification center, weather will update and use some data, including your cached location, but it won't have to use triangulation or GPS. If you connect to a new cell tower, it will recache your location for weather. Cell towers have a radius of maybe 50 km.

Again, I'm not sure about time zone location. All cell phones can get time zone information from the data connection, since the cell tower the phone is registered to (connected to) has information about the time zone in that area. This is how your non-smart phone from yesteryear was able to update the time automatically when you got off the plane. It didn't have an intricate location API, but it did ask the cell tower for time zone info every time you connected to a new one. What I'm guessing is that this is only active if connected to a cell tower close to a time zone border. The phone could use more specific location information than it did for weather to decide which side of the time zone line you are on, and keep you more accurate than just asking the tower. This could hurt battery life. I'm not sure how it's implemented or if I have the right idea with this one, so take this paragraph with a grain of salt.

2. Closing out all applications vs. keeping them in memory.

Keeping an application frozen in memory takes a very small amount of battery power, to maintain state in the ram blocks that are holding the data. Very small. Loading a program from the SSD takes a MASSIVE amount of battery power by comparison. Not to mention the load on the CPU, or the fact that many programs communicate with the battery-hated web when launched. It depends, but you may be significantly worse off closing out applications if any of them get relaunched than you would if you just left things alone. I think how it works currently is that frozen apps stay frozen pretty much indefinitely unless a program in the foreground demands more memory than is available, at which point the oldest running program gets terminated. This is probably beneficial to the battery for most use cases. If you had a lot of memory heavy apps and always went through them in order, and then started over once you got to the end, you might be better off terminating. Realistically, I think people tend to use a few apps very regularly. Keeping those in memory is better on the battery than relaunching.

Very few programs are allowed to run in the background. Most programs are, in fact, frozen in memory (requires no CPU effort. state is saved and execution is halted completely). Running in the background can only occur in a few specific scenarios: 1 is to maintain a VOIP connection, ala skype. Only a single program can leverage that service at one time, so you can't have 3 VOIP services running at once in the background. Even if such a program is running in the background, it isn't allowed to use very much in terms of resources. It's basically just allowed to maintain a VOIP connection. The other similar situation is for streaming music. You can stream music from an app in the background, but only a single app, and the amount of resources allowed are also very restricted. Last is if a program needs a little bit more time to run, it can do so in the background, but not for very long (seconds, not minutes, maybe 5 or 10 seconds before it's forced to freeze or quit)

That's it!

 

I hate seeing my sister killing all the apps every few hours... now I can tell her to stop that with an argument Thank you

You mention a big discussion about 3G vs Edge... and what did we learn?

 

We learned we need better batteries and better 3g radios. I think we pretty much got that. I wouldn't worry about edge on an iPhone 4/s. If you're really into saving your battery, the real way to do it is airplane mode. That turns off all the radios and internet access. You can manually connect to a wifi network after airplane mode is on and just have the wifi radio active for internet connectivity, which is the lowest power radio on the device.

 

But then you don't have a phone, you have an iPod touch which is kind of a problem if someone tries to call you.

 

We always need everything to be better

Okay thanks for the information!

 

exactly. hardcore power saving.

 

All the new features would use battery life. Using iCloud and Notifications would also affect battery life. Turn off the features that you don't need. On my Droid, I kept on what I needed (mail, messenger, social networking, weather, news) and turned off what I do need.

One thing I did was instead of every service, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ ...etc giving me notifications through the app, I coursed their notifications to Gmail which is already set to push mail to me as soon as it gets it.

Yes, closing them wastes battery life. Keeping them suspended in the memory does not.

 

I have disabled iMessages and noticed reasonable battery savings. Since my plan covers free and unlimited text messages I wouldn't care.

 

that shouldn't have any affect... its much preferred to use iMessages for those people who don't want to waste their money getting ripped off for text message plans that cost the carries next to nothing to do, but love to charge for it.

The thing I like about iMessage is that maybe if enough people use it and stop using Text Messages... they'll finally try to lower prices or stop charging for the feature altogether if no one uses them anymore.

 

I have been experiencing battery loss as well as every time restart my device my phone will not register to the cellular network. Idk if it is a hardware issue. I have to end up restoring my phone in order to get my network signal. has anyone experienced this problem then plz let me know. ...................