Terrrible Battery Life

Hey Everyone,

So I recieved my iPhone after patiently waiting for years for the device to come on Verizon and I'm super excited about the phone and love it so far, but I'm having one issue with is the battery life. It seems that everytime I do anything I can legit watch the battery live percentage indicator drop down and down. Last night I send a two line email over 3G and my battery dropped 6% by the time it was done. Then later in the night I was listening to music stored on my iPhone and was texting one person back and forth for about 30 mins which used about 25% of my battery. By 10 P.M my iPhone was compleatly dead and I was at work and didn't use it until 4 P.M when I got out and I only streamed Pandora for about 40 mins on my ride home and used the Tom Tom while doing this. In total I made about 10 mins of calls and only sent one email with no web browsing and my phone was dead by 10. In all I think I used it maybe five hours at the most and it was dead. Is this normal?

Last night I charged it fully, took it off at 7 AM and there were two app updates that I applied in the morning (Skype and Speed Test) which were downloaded over 3G and then I sent maybe ten texts at the most and listened to music stored on the device for maybe ten minutes and the phone is at 92% and it's 10:30. Is this normal? Any reccomendations? Everywhere I go I have full siginal, the brightness is down and I'm running the latest OS and iTunes. Please help! I feel like everytime I touch my iPhone the battery drops and drops. Like opening notepad and typing a three/line note would probably drop the battery 1%.

Accepted answers

AZSALUKI

try not to worry too much about monitoring the % it drops as this is just an estimate anyway. what you described above is considered pretty heavy use (streaming music while using gps will kill the battery fairly quickly). i'm not sure which phone you are coming from, but if you have never had a smart phone, then you will likely have to get used to charging it EVERY night if you use it fairly heavily. 5 hours of "actual use" is not that bad and you will find that different types of use drain it quicker than others. streaming music/video and navigation, in particualr, drain it quick. you should be able to get a full day's use with one full charge if most of that day it is on standby. but 5+ hours of streaming, gps, texting, etc, could run it down. iphone actually has a better battery than most other smartphones. if you look into bb's and droids, you'll see that they get about half of that life (ie: about 2.5 hours of actual use and 12-15 hours of standby and my htc battery is GONE!!! lol)

All comments

carlwertz

My guess is you have something running in the background that you dont know you have running. I started with 100% this AM and down till 83% now, off the charger at 7AM. I am guessing these are smart batteries and learn how to stay charged. Anyone else seeing this?

AZSALUKI

carlwertz wrote:
My guess is you have something running in the background that you dont know you have running. I started with 100% this AM and down till 83% now, off the charger at 7AM. I am guessing these are smart batteries and learn how to stay charged. Anyone else seeing this?

yes. they are suppused to be fully charged, then fully drained at least when you initially use it. then i believe apple recomends that you do that at least once per month so it stays "trained" so to speak.

lou0685

Make sure you close apps Double tap the home button hold your thumb over 1 app you will see - sighn in a red cicle just tap the circle and they will close,shut wifi down,download an App called battery magic.

carlwertz

Batteries are way smarter these days. Does Apple state to drain and recharge fully once a month, that doenst sound like something they would do as this phone is a one stop show...

AZSALUKI

carlwertz wrote:
Batteries are way smarter these days. Does Apple state to drain and recharge fully once a month, that doenst sound like something they would do as this phone is a one stop show...

Use iPhone Regularly

For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).

http://www.apple.com/batteries/iphone.html

yes. contrary to popular opinion, it is no different than any other smart phone.

ccaldwell1003

lou0685 wrote:
Make sure you close apps Double tap the home button hold your thumb over 1 app you will see - sighn in a red cicle just tap the circle and they will close,shut wifi down,download an App called battery magic.

Doesn't that delete the apps off the phone?

lou0685

ccaldwell1003 wrote:
lou0685 wrote:
Make sure you close apps Double tap the home button hold your thumb over 1 app you will see - sighn in a red cicle just tap the circle and they will close,shut wifi down,download an App called battery magic.
Doesn't that delete the apps off the phone?

no because when you double tap the home button it it brings up a list of icons at the bottom and shades out the home screen.to deltete you just hold down on an app icon until the app icons start shaking and you will see an X within a blck circle tap the circle and a delete prompt will come up.

Abi

ccaldwell1003 wrote:
lou0685 wrote:
Make sure you close apps Double tap the home button hold your thumb over 1 app you will see - sighn in a red cicle just tap the circle and they will close,shut wifi down,download an App called battery magic.
Doesn't that delete the apps off the phone?

No, I believe you have to actually hook your phone up to iTunes on a pc to delete an app.

ja1234

ccaldwell1003 wrote:
lou0685 wrote:
Make sure you close apps Double tap the home button hold your thumb over 1 app you will see - sighn in a red cicle just tap the circle and they will close,shut wifi down,download an App called battery magic.
Doesn't that delete the apps off the phone?

nope only when you see a black circle wityh a x in it... but in the location on the bottom that opens with a double tap only gives you an red circle with a - in it to close the app..

wsanders

There might be some dodgy apps, but playing whack-a-mole with apps doesn't have much effect on my iPhone, unlike with the HTC Evo I used to have. I am really really really happy with iPhone power management.

In my case, GPS and email push were initially the big battery suckers. Google Latitude installed with "Background Updating" enabled. When I disabled that and email push my standby time shot up from less than a day to (estimated) 2, maybe three days. And, all this with Wifi ON and Bluetooth ON. I don't have to do all that fiddling with turning network services on and off like I did with my HTC Evo.

I also have "Notifications" off, and "Mail Folders to Push" set on only for my inboxes. I even have location services enabled for most apps. If the Location Services arrow is not present in the top bar when you go to the Home screen, then you are cool with the GPS not sucking your battery down in the background.

The ultimate battery sucker is Map Navigation. That will suck your battery dry in just a few hours. Same for the Droid though.