I’m a little surprised I have to say. I bought the iPhone 4 for various reasons, the HD video, the speed of the processor, the retina display, but also the improved battery life. Previous to my iPhone 4 I had an iPhone 3G. As I recently blogged, iOS 4 turned my 3G into somewhat of a brick, the betas turning my battery life south.
Apple touted (at around 45:30 in their WWDC 2010 keynote) that the iPhone battery life was around a 40% more improvement over the 3GS. Now, I had a 3G, so my battery life should likely be more than that as I am sure the 3GS would have had some improvement over the 3G.
With the 2 year old iPhone 3G I would plug the phone in to charge over night, and unplug it when I went to work at 0700 am. By the time I went to bed around 2230 pm, the battery was pretty low to dead, so of course with my iPhone 4 I was expecting a big improvement over this. The reality is, I’m not seeing that, despite using the iPhone 4 less.
Why am I using it less? Because my mobile provider O2 are now capping data at 500MB per month, so I am now really only using the 3G when I have to (for Twitter mostly). So I thought even my new usage style would save a big chunk too.
Anyway, back to the battery performance of the iPhone 4 -> turns out it’s not the great improvement I had hoped. With less email accounts, but the same number of apps receiving push notifications, I can still only eek the battery out until the next morning (ie an additional overnight when it’s effectively in standby).
That seemed wrong to me, so I thought I would scale back any network activity the iPhone 4 is doing:
- I got rid of push email via GMail, and changed it back to fetch every 30 mins.
- Removed all other email accounts
- Stopped any applications receiving push notifications
Still no improvement unfortunately, which was a shame. I can’t (to be honest) understand how my battery is being eaten away so quickly. The phone might as well be in airplane mode, but it still seems to go through battery significantly when in standby.
I’m not the only one. My friend @jonguntrip has the same. He’s doing overnight charges, but seeing the battery drain significantly.
The strangest thing is when I see comments like this from other iPhone 4 users:
“Battery life seems longer too. Just like the iPad, takes longer to charge but considerably longer (esp iPad) to discharge.”
I’ve seen an iPad in action, and it’s battery life is extremely long. Of course the iPad has a massive battery compared. I’m experiencing the opposite though, charging is quick, as well as discharging.
Anyone else experiencing the same, or different? Keen to see if I’m the only one seeing this type of battery behaviour, and if I have a dud.
See my real world results of iPhone 4 audio playback battery performance.
In addition, check out this article where I discuss some stats received from this article over the past few days.
Update (08/07/10): I took my iPhone 4 into the Apple Store (Regent Street London) to the Genius Bar. They ran a test on it, and decided that the battery wasn’t good enough. They replaced it without charge. I have since retested the battery and am getting a slightly better performance out of it, which is good news at least. See my real world analysis for more details…
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Same here. I, too, upgraded from a 3G. I would plug it into my charger every night with more than 75% remaining — for two years. With the iP4, it’s down to about 50% every night, and my habits have not changed with the new phone.
Same here. I had a 3gs before and it only seems slightly better. With the 3gs I would shut the 3g off as much as possible since that seemed to drain the battery a lot faster. Also turning down the display brightness as much as possible also helps (but is annoying to have to do multiple times a day). I’m hoping a jailbreak will come soon so I can use SBsettings to accomplish both these tasks a little easier.
I’m losing 30% an hour! Shutting all network down (bluetooth, location services, 3G, searching for wi-fi when there is none, brightness all the way down, running one app at a time, only edge on, anything that’s not nesicary is off) and it doesn’t help at all! I’m bringing it to apple because I’m convinced it’s a dud. When did apple forget how to make a good phone?
My battery life isn’t good at all either.. Very dissapointing, I use it alot because I’m only 16 and I text more then I should, but it’s the same life span as my 3G had that I upgraded from.. I don’t have any email accounts set up, and no push notifications. I turn my 3G off, brightness down, vibrate and sound off, .
I’ve had a 3G and 3GS, and my iPhone 4 battery life span is much less than my 3GS, by some way. I always turn my phone off overnight, so imagine my surprise when I lose between 10-15% charge while the phone is off! On my 3GS I’d have everything running (push, 3G, wi-fi, location services etc) all the time, but even if I turned everything off – which defeats the purpose of an iPhone – I still can’t last more than a day and a half on very light usage.
im facing the same problem as well.
my battery drains quicker then any iphone i’ve had, and i had them all!
i tried evreything from closing all the apps that running on backgroung to turning the push notification off.
i even turned off my 3g network but nothing seems to help, no improvement!
big dissapointment!
All I really want out of the iPhone’s battery is the ability to last every waking hour of the day until I’m able to plug it back in at night. In other words, somewhere between sixteen and eighteen hours of light use (a tweet here, a phone call there, etc.)
After seeing my battery go from 100% to 5% (thus shutting the phone off) over night in sleep mode, I’ve begun the process of trying to diagnose the problem. After turning off wifi, push notifications, location services, and everything else, I started from scratch at 100% with the phone in sleep mode. Three hours later (which is right now) and the phone still reports 99% charge. While three hours may not be the biggest span, I think I can safely make a hypothesis about what was draining my battery; It was either the background apps, the location services, wifi, or the combination of all three. A more scientific method would have been to turn everything off one at a time, but I really don’t have multiple days to spend on this (I only have today because it is a holiday and I don’t have much need for my phone).
Taking my hypothesis further, assuming that one of the apps in the background was draining the battery, it could just be that one of the apps wasn’t compatible with ios4 yet, and wasn’t able to properly “sleep” in the way that Steve Jobs claims applications are now able to. If the problem was networking, a simple fix would be for sleep mode to suspend wifi/3G usage (which either Apple or jailbreakers can implement). Either way, something needs to be done, because in the previous configuration, I couldn’t even have gotten an entire day out of my battery.
If you are having similar problems to me, try the following experiment: turn off 3G, wifi, and location services, and then double click home and kill all running apps. Now charge the phone to 100%, and see if your battery life hasn’t improved (you’ll have to turn 3G or Wifi on when you need it via this method obviously).
It’ll be a pain to have to turn on 3G every time (if that turns out to be the problem, but I personally think it was a rogue app) I need it, but it is better than having my phone die on me randomly at some point during the day. If I have to eventually buy a case with a standalone battery, so be it. I can’t believe we’re having these problems, but then again, there is a price to be paid for having “the slimmest smart phone ever”.
I also purchased the iPhone 4 expecting a vast improvement over my 3G, since my girlfriend has had an iPhone 3GS its always had about 40/50% extra battery life than my 3g, i was expecting a similar jump up from hers. But in actual fact i am definitley seeing far less battery life than she is. Whats more, I used to do the old trick of turning of 3G on my old phone to get an extra day or so out of the battery, with the iPhone 4 this seems to hardly work. Over the weekend as I often do, i took a break out from my city overnight, and expected not to have to charge my iphone if i switched it to 2g only and lowered the brightness. But alas, the battery died within 18 hours or so.. I really dont get it. I’m sure the capacity is more, I know the CPU will be driving a lot of usage but I wasnt playing games etc.
I dont understand how a blog like ENGADGET can not notice this when reviewing the iPhone 4, they got 38 hours of medium to heavy use!! What the hell.. I can only assume Apple has put in bigger batteries for the review phones! Or there’s a few iphone 4′s out there which have been given dud batteries, perhaps batteries for the 3GS and not the new iPhone.
I’m now 24 hours into my experiment with my iphone 4′s battery. With everything off, my battery still reads 99%. It’s clear to me now that something was definitely draining the battery, whether it was wifi, a rogue app, or some combination.
If you are having problems like me, the silver lining is that in my experience, you can fix it if you are willing to…turn off wifi, 3G, and make sure all apps are closed. That shouldn’t be necessary, but I can’t argue with the results (99% after 24 hours in standby).
This just proves the necessity of a task manager that shows exactly what is happening on the phone. A task manager should be able to show usage, and then you could close things until you found whatever was causing the heavy battery drain. Since we can’t see exactly what is happening on the phone though, we have to suffer. I can’t wait for a jailbreak for this thing, so that I can finally gain proper insight into just what I can do to create a happy middle between functionality and battery life.
I’ve just posted some real world results of iPhone 4 audio playback vs battery life here: http://www.reynoldsftw.com/2010/07/iphone-4-battery-real-world-results/
The battery life is either just terrible or I have a dud. My 3G was definitely better than this. I unplugged the iPhone 4 for at 11pm with a full charge and went to bed I woke up at 6:30am and was already at 85% of battery life. How can you lose 15% just in standby??? On a phone that is suppose to have 40% better battery life. I really need to take the phone back and exchange it.
Yeah, having the same problem too…
Wifi off, luminosity at minimum, no calls ans very few text messaging, my battery drop approximately 1% per minute…
Went to Apple and I put myself on the priority list for a straight retail swap. None instore though, so stuck with lemon for now.
Also got a genius appointment tomorrow, perhaps they can swap out the battery? Will go anyway.
HI, Steve.
I’d just like to chime in and say I’m experiencing poor battery life as well. I’ve been scouring the net over the last week looking for people with similar stories and have found a fair amount in that time. It is at least comforting — in a strange way — to know that it is not an isolated issue.
I’ve had my iPhone 4 since launch day and I have yet to get more than 3 hours of use on a single charge. Standby times have been acceptable, but battery drain when the iPhone is awake/in use is just appalling. I lose 1% every 2-3 minutes in using the phone regardless of what I am doing. Even more alarming is the fact that mine becomes noticeably warm within a few minutes of use. There is definitely something constantly pushing the hardware to the limit in mine, although I have yet to establish what exactly that is. I don’t even necessarily think that the problem is with the battery per se, but that something — either software or hardware — is causing the battery to discharge at an unusually fast rate.
I’m in the process of restoring mine to factory defaults and setting it up as a new phone at this moment. If this shows no improvement, I’ll have to show it to Apple. Please let us know how your Genius appointment goes and whether a new phone makes a difference. If it is any consolation, there seem to be way more people who are reporting stellar battery life than there are who report bad battery life. So at least we have a great chance of getting a longer lasting replacement.
Hi All,
I went to Apple and got a replacement. The Genius (at Regent Street branch) was great. They ran a phone usage test, which showed the best time I gained was 6 hours usage between charges, which they said was pretty low.
Straight swap – let’s hope this new one isn’t a lemon – it was fresh off of the delivery van, so hopefully not a dud!
My issues with battery life began when I downloaded iOS4 to my 3G. I visited the local Apple store and received 3 new phones since the battery problem AND the heat of the phone were obvious.
I received my new iPhone4 in the mail from AT&T. Same issue. I’m on my 3rd new phone and there’s no resolution to this problem. I can get at best 5 hours of battery life and that includes shutting down almost everything…
So, in the past three weeks, I’ve had 7 new phones (4-3G / 3 iPhone4), talked to techs at Apple including a ‘senior administrator’. None of them had heard of this issue, so I’m glad you have brought this out in the open.
I hope there’s a way to resolve this. I’ve been with Apple for 23 years and would hate to leave over this phone problem.
My battery is draining at 5% per hour in standby measured by leaving it overnight for nine hours, starting with a full charge. After 9 hours it was down to 62%.
I have:
1) 3G on
2) Bluetooth on, but not connected to any device
3) Wifi On (but I think it turns off on standby)
4) 2 Exchange Accounts set to Push
5) Push notifications and locations services on (I guess)
None of this services are out of the ordinary. Apple restricted many os features with the promise of increased stability and battery life. But as far as battery life is conserved this does not appeared to have paid off.
I had the same problem. I wonder if it is the screen that takes more power. I had wifi and bluetooth off, but push notifications were on. I tried different things, but to no avail. It would not last the whole day – I use email a lot for work. I returned it and went back to my 3g because I have to be able to use it all day.
I had the same battery life and heat problem. Before trying the more drastic options, I thought I’d try an intermediate one. I turned off all features such as push, location services etc (basically everything) and disabled all my e-mail accounts. I then turned off the phone and put it on to charge for the night. The next day I turned it back on and re-enabled all the features except push. To my surprise, I’m now on my third day of use and I’ve just got the 20% power warning up. Now, unless the problem comes back when I enable push (which I doubt) the steps taken do seem to have cleared the problem for me (for now)
To add to previous post, Push is back on and not causing any issues.
I’m not in any way an expert but did overhear one apple employee tell a customer complaining that his battery dies quickly after upgrading to iOS4 that the problem was multitasking. I just woke up not too long ago and found my phone at 55%, that’s with the fact it was at 86% when I went to sleep? When I double clicked home, their were multiple apps running(not to say that is the cause). Either way, they should let us chose what apps to keep “frozen” and which to just close. I’m getting tired of having to open the multitasking window so that I may close all the apps :/
HI all,
very interesting discussion. I’ve been doing a lot of tests both with my old 3G, a nexus1 and the new iphone4. I’ve seen a massive variation of battery life with the iphone (3G & 4) just by changing settings. The number one initial culprit is push. whenever I turned on push the battery would drain 3 times faster (24hrs life compared to 82hours with no push and light usage but with 3g & wifi enabled).
I used to have massive problems on my old 3G with push enabled going from 48hrs life to more like 14hrs so never used it. Oddly, and very frustratingly I one discovered that I had accidentally enabled push on the 3G and battery life was at around 36hrs (pretty good!), then suddenly a month later I would get 14hr battery drain again which would easily be fixed by disabling push again. enabling push again would drain the battery fast. It seems the only way to get good battery life was by sneakily enabling push when you installed a new push dependent app. Sounds crazy but it seemed to work.
I heard much better reports from the 3GS and 4 but so far the 4 drains quite quickly for me with push enabled. Also, a lot of location background apps will eat battery super fast! (Like latitude).
Serious battery drain problems are likely hardware related, but do try a factory reset and see how your device perform with no apps and no push for a day or two before you load it up with all your apps again, just to rule out hardware.
Here’s some of my stats, i’ve extrapolated the longer lasting iphone times and may well have totally messed up my maths on this, apologies if I’ve got it wrong but I’ve added the raw data so fel free to correct me.
Test1: moderate use (2hr) with app and acct sync latitude maybe off
phone time
nexus1 12hr
iphone 40hr (at 70% after 12 hr 3.3 times better)
Test 2: moderate use (3hr) with no sync/push latitude on
phone time
nexus1 18hr
iphone 41.8hr (at 57% after 18 hr 2.3 times better)
Test 3 min use (2hr) with full app sync / push
phone time
nexus1 13hr
iphone 30.9hr (at 58% after 13 hr 2.3 times better)
test4 min use (1hr) with no appsync / push
phone time
nexus1 24hr
iphone 81.6hr (at 71% after 24hr 3.4 times better)
test 5 watch stardust (2hr) on repeat
phone time
nexus1 3hr
iphone 20hr (after 3hr: iphone on 86%, n1 on 31% 7.14 times better)
I’m experiencing the same pain with battery life.
New iPhone 4 (from job), 100% battery this morning at 8:00 when I unplugged it from power, 23% at 17:05 with very low usage.
Pathetic in comparison to my old Nokia E71 whose, under heavy usage, still last 3 full days 21 month after I purchased it.
ok, reset phone to factory as usage time was going up when phone was supposed to be sleeping. Have reinstalled limited subset of apps.
left phone overnight and lost 10% in 8 hours, not bad.
The next day I used 30% battery with 2h22m use over a 13h20m period.
now 60% after 21h20m
Have push email/calendar/contacts
push notifications enabled for: Remember The Milk, PayPal, Hullo Mail
this seems much better than pervious tests with push enabled. maybe having more push apps running drains more power? I wouldn’t have thought so, but with less apps I’m seeing better battery life from the surface of things.
Will install new apps every few days and see if I can narrow it down a bit, I suspect a background running app, spotify drained power very fast (1% every 5 mins), and I was using a google latitude client which I suspect drains power even when turned off.
currently installed apps:
Hullo Mail
Springpad
1Password
Remember the milk
nation rail
oyster£
tube deluxe
uk traffic
London journey planner
Paypal
Flixster Movies
Wikipanion
pUniverse
taste london
yelp
Topple2
2 accross
you vs wall
fruit ninja
flight control
So, after a fresh factory reset with only above apps installed, i’m getting much better battery life, only lost 5% over night, and now forced to recharge as I need a charged phone this evening.
current stats:
18 aug 2010
battery: 49%
notifcations: hulloMail, PaylPal, RTM
exchange gmail: fetch 1hr
usage: 3h32m
standby: 1d11h
calls 24m
sent: 1.9MB
recv: 9.4MB