Are you having issues with your iPhone 4S’s battery?
Well you are not the only one.
So being the decent guy I am, I thought that I would redress the balance that my other rant has got relating to the pi** poor Samsung S2’s battery life and let “the otherside” have their say on the iPhones similarly poor battery life.
Lessons learned from earlier rant:
I have to say there were some lessons learned in the last post about the S2, and that was that I offered no real solutions for the problem that I so happily whinged about…this made me feel bad for a short period, (perhaps six seconds)
Well, I still have no tips on improving the battery life, even though I have commented on various trials I have done in the comments section of the article, so I can only say that my next idea is quite simply to get a petition sent to manufacturers to sort out the battery problems for the new range of smartphones that we now consume like ravenous gadget freaks from another planet.
Albeit ones who are left with a block of no good plastic in our pockets unless we carry spare batteries around all day.
This is no good my friends no good at all.
So without further ado, let us hear about some of the iPhone 4’s battery life issues:
Firstly though, let me just say that I was a convert to my Samsung S2 from an iPhone 3G, and I have to say I had no issues whatsoever with this phones battery, but in all honesty, I never browsed the internet or did much more than play quite simple games every now and again.
Smartphones are now actually smart:
Something has happened in the last two years and that is the original breed of smartphones have now got so smart that they simply run out of power due to brain overload, it really is almost that simple.
We have what can only be described as high end laptops, by yesterdays standards, in a device that fits snugly in our pockets.
This leaves an enormous amount of pressure for batteries to keep up, and unlike “Moore’s law” that states that our processors will double in speed, and halve in size and cost each year, our battery performance levels do not replicate this phenomenon….I may have got that law slightly incorrect so do not hold me to it, but you get my point.
iOS 5 full of bugs?
Yes, it seems that iOS 5 was initially full of bugs, as many operating systems are. Such is the keenness to get these new selling points out to the mass market and begin a proper trial that early adopters often pay the price of being a bit flash.
So let us first see what bugs are around currently that seem to have a particularly negative detriment to the iPhone 4S battery life:
The main ones initially reported were:
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- Calendar bug – This little beast saps your battery life by continually updating and reordering your events, no fix seems to be available just yet so simply turn the blighter off for now.
- Time zone bug – Simply saps your battery big style, to solve go to Settings > Location Services > System Services > Setting Time Zone and disable Location Services.
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Location services seem to be to blame in general:
Yes, similar to the GPS option on the Samsung. When your phone is updating continually due to location settings being used for data retrieval and calculations, this is when the battery is getting zapped the most. Which makes sense, as this kind of background grunt work is pretty processor intensive and so you can expect that it will eat into your precious battery life.
Another suggestion, would be to make sure you always stay up to date with iOS updates, as these can fix issue such as battery life.
So what has your experience been like with your iPhone 4S?
And please do let us know any tips you may have that help improve the battery life of the Apple iPhone 4S.
Anthony Munns