Some Fixes for the iPhone 4S Battery Drain
A few weeks with the new phone under their belt, some new iPhone 4S users have figured out why the phone's battery might be draining too fast and found some fixes that mostly work. The new phone is mostly rad, but all of those fancy phone features are an energy suck. While the iPhone 4S's battery life has some improvement for talk time, data and WiFi usage are less efficient, reports Geeky Gadgets. But it turns out, the phone is having bigger battery issues than that, with over a thousand upset iPhone owners taking to the Apple Forums, complaining of battery-drainage. They're not perfect, but they have some ideas to fix the problem that are the best iPhoners have for now.
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iCloud Syncing
The problem: One of the cooler iOS 5 features was the iCloud integration. The 4S, and really any device with the updated iOS, syncs iTunes, iWork and Photos up to the cloud. It's pretty cool, but apparently drains batter life, reports MacWorld's Christopher Breen. He noted that his phone dropped a battery percentage point every couple of minutes. That's very fast for a phone that's supposed to have up to 200 hours of standby time. After doing a little investigation, Breen deduced the problem had something to do with the iCloud sync up, which was stuck in a perpetual sync. "The iPhone appeared to be in a crashing loop ... And this was killing the battery," he explains.
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The fix: Wipe the phone and resync it to iCloud. At least that's how Breen fixed things up. "On restart I chose to set it up as a new phone rather than pulling a backup from my Mac or iCloud," he writes. "When the time came, I switched on contact syncing within the iCloud screen and fired up System Activity Monitor."
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Setting Time Zone
The Problem: Another possible issues that iDownload Bug's Oliver Haslam diagnosed comes from a bug that causes the Setting Time Zone function to constantly track the user's location.
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The fix: Turn that setting off. To do this, go to System Services, which is under Location Services, under Settings and toggle "Setting Time Zone" off. It's not exactly a perfect fix, because it disables that feature, meaning the iPhone will no longer automatically reset the time zone as it travels. And if one forgets to do that it could lead to an alarm clock disaster. But, it's a price to pay for longer battery life. Haslam's fixed increased usage life by 3 hours and standby time by 15 hours.
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Reminders
The Problem: Another nifty add on that comes with the new phone is Reminders, which true to its name, works with Siri to set-up reminders for things we'd otherwise forget. A really tight part of Reminders is that a location can trigger a reminder. "Stop at the liquor store on the way home from the reunion," for example. To know when to send out the reminder, the phone constantly checks GPS, thus sucking the living daylights out of your phone.
The Fix: Chill out on the location-based reminders. It's not an ideal fix, but priorities, right?
Update 2:41 p.m.: Apple is personally contacting iPhone owners who are having these serious battery problems, reports The Guardian. "One owner has told the Guardian that Apple contacted him directly and asked him to install a monitoring program on the phone to try to diagnose the problem," writes The Guardian. Pretty sweet, huh? Hopefully these tests will offer some answers to what's causing the rapid battery suck and how to fix it.