iPhone 4S Users Drained by Battery Bug

KOMPAS.com - Battery life issues with the iPhone 4S, which even Apple's own store staff have struggled to fix, are being investigated by the company.

Suspected bugs in iOS5 have caused the battery on the new iPhone model to drain rapidly for some users – and frustrated customers have been flooding online forums. A thread on the issues on Apple's own forums has had almost 2200 replies and over 140,000 views

One Australian Apple store employee and app developer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said while doing nothing with the phone his battery life was dropping 10 per cent an hour even with non important location settings, Siri, Bluetooth and other features switched off.

With normal use he dropped 19 per cent in 50 minutes and sometimes the battery dropped away at an even faster rate than that.

"I've been a developer using beta iOS5 on iPhone 4 right through to Gold Master and then upgraded to 4S whereby I can notice a big battery difference between the two models," the store staffer told Fairfax Media.

"I guess in Apple's defence they did state it has 100 hours less standby time."

However, over the weekend fixes have been circulating web forums and the same Apple store staffer quoted above was able to finally fix the problem.

"It was to do with Location Services constantly checking my location especially for the Time Zone," he said.

He was able to solve the problem by switching everything off in the Location Services > System Services menu except for Cell Network Search. His phone now lasts "pretty much the whole day".

The Guardian reported that a flaw in iOS5, which caused the phone to constantly check its location even when there was no apparent reason to do so, was the culprit. This can be turned off by disabling the "Setting Time Zone" function.

Apple has yet to make a formal comment on the matter – and its Australian office didn't respond this morning – but for weeks people have been hitting online forums like Whirlpool and Apple's own support boards looking for answers.

The company's engineers have been contacting some iPhone 4S owners who have complained of battery life issues individually and asked them to install a monitoring program on their phone to try and diagnose the problem.

Mathew Peterson, who runs the Australian app development company TheLittleAppFactory, said he found that another issue affecting the iPhone 4S battery life was the iCloud contacts syncing code, which was crashing repeatedly in a loop when it hit corrupt contacts in a loop.

This issue largely affects those who have upgraded from previous iPhone models and causes the phone's processor to work ultra-hard. The results is that the phone runs "noticeably warm" and it causes "the battery to drop 20-30 per cent in 10-15 minutes".

"It's possible to fix the issue by disabling contacts in iCloud or restarting the device," said Peterson.

"Others have found it useful to reinstall the entire OS and then copy the contacts back on."

Peterson said while he previously experienced battery life issues, they were no longer present. He expected Apple to quickly rectify the problem with an over-the-air update.

While it's not as serious as the "antennagate" issues affecting the iPhone 4, which caused poor reception and dropped calls, the issue was enough to have Apple fans worried.

"Battery life is by far the weakest link in the iPhone and it's only going to get worse as battery technology sluggishly inches forward," said Peterson.

"With iOS5 there are so many instances where a previously dormant iPhone will now be doing things."

For example, he said when iCloud was switched on with "find my friends" enabled, any time someone else looks at your location, your phone enables location services and sends data via 3G.

"The list of things like that goes on and on ... whether it be contacts, calendars, etc, syncing constantly or photos being uploaded or apps being automatically downloaded, the phone is far more connected now and much more likely to run dry very quickly," he said.